Understanding Mabel
by William Easley
Summary: Mabel's down in the dumps because her boyfriend's away for orientation to his college. To help her work through her feelings, Dipper decides that he and Wendy will make a cheer-up video for her. But - well, best-laid plans, man. Even best-laid plans gang aft agley. And in Gravity Falls, they can go way agley. Wendip is included for free.
1. Chapter 1

_I do not own the show GRAVITY FALLS or any of the characters; both are the property of the Walt Disney Company and of Alex Hirsch. I make no money from these stories but write just for fun and in the hope that other fans enjoy reading them. I will ask, please, do not copy my stories elsewhere on the Internet. I work hard on these, and they mean a lot to me. Thank you._

* * *

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 3-6, 2017)**

* * *

**1: Production Meeting**

On Thursday at lunch, Dipper explained what he wanted to do. Wendy, just setting her paper plate on the card table in the break room, sounded dubious: "Dude, is that such a good plan?" she asked. "What would your sister do if she came up with that idea?"

Dipper smiled at her as he sat down. "What do you think?"

"Well," Wendy admitted as she popped the tab on her soda can, "she'd say, 'All ideas are good ideas!' and go right ahead with it. But, seriously, Dipper, you usually think everything through at least twice. OK, say we go with it. You're not gonna be all hyper-critical, are you?"

"No!" Dipper said. "Why would you even think that? No, it's just—well, Mabel can be kind of self-absorbed, you know? She's already dropping hints about how our wedding is going to go. She wants to decorate the City Hall and release a flight of doves—"

"Oh, no, no, no! Bad idea," Wendy said. "Even if it's Mabel's. Mourning doves wouldn't strike the right tone—you don't mourn at a wedding. Domestic doves wouldn't stand a chance in the wild, because there are too many predators and hunters. The collared doves are invasive, and we shouldn't help them spread. They're the reason Oregon dove season lasts all year round."

"I didn't know that," Dipper said, munching on a fry.

"Yeah. Not mourning doves, though—that season ends in October. Any other species, fair game year-round, man. But releasing a flock of doves wouldn't make me happy, and it'd end badly for the doves. Anyway, we want just a quiet, quick civil marriage. Let her know that."

"You talk her out of it," Dipper said. "Only wait until after Sunday—"

"'Cause she's in Sweater Town until Teek gets home again," Wendy said. She took a bite of her hamburger. They had just twenty minutes for lunch—really took her back to her high-school years, this grab 'n gobble break.

Mabel was indeed in Sweater Town, at least metaphorically, because Teek was off in Atlanta, Georgia, or near it, taking the campus orientation tour and doing all the paperwork for his coming freshman year at the Georgia College of Arts and Film Studies. It wasn't a long separation, though. He would be gone really only today, Friday, and Saturday, and he'd be back by Sunday noon, but even so, Mabel was feeling sorry for herself.

"Not literally in Sweater Town," Dipper said between bites and swallows. "She's not off hiding with her collar pulled up to her forehead, like I've seen her do before. But she did ask me if she could take off work and just hang out in my room today."

"That reminds me, she wants her dinner brought up, too. Your turn for that one, Dip." Wendy said. Dipper had taken Mabel a breakfast tray—scrambled eggs with cheese, home fries, Canadian bacon, and toast, with orange juice, coffee, cream, and sugar. Then a few minutes after noon, Wendy had run her up a tray with a double burger, all the trimmings, fries, a fruit cup, and a Pitt Cola.

Mabel, sprawled on her old bed with Tripper curled up at her feet, had said without enthusiasm, "Thanks, but I'm not really very hungry." However, her breakfast tray was empty, and Wendy picked it up.

"OK, just eat what you want," she told Mabel, suspecting that Mabel would polish off everything. Even bad moods didn't much affect her appetite. "I'll let Tripper go out and run around for a little while."

"Thanks." Mabel put her headphones on and sat on the side of the bed, reaching for the burger. She had the volume set so high that Wendy recognized the song: "Weighty," by Lockdown.

She and Tripper went downstairs, the dog scooted outside to do what dogs did outside—and then probably to be ingratiating, roaming around with big loving puppy eyes and mooching from the tourists—and, humming the tune of the song, Wendy had joined Dipper in the break room for their own lunch. Abuelita was taking cooking duties, and while her hamburgers were tasty, they somehow lacked the special flavor of Teek's. Dipper had put extra mustard on his, unusual for him. "She still moping?" he asked.

"Oh, yeah."

"What's that song you were humming?" Dipper asked. "Seems like I should know it."

Wendy waited until she'd swallowed before replying. "Mabel's got her sad playlist going." She sang softly, "Feelin' the tragedy / Deep in the heart of me / Heavy like gravity, / Girl, it's so weighty."

"Oh, right, Lockdown. Huh. She's listening to break-up songs?"

"Don't think they're all like that. Just sad songs that make her feel down. When she swings away from cheerful, she swings down real low, doesn't she?"

"Oh, yeah, she's moody," Dipper said. They munched their burgers and fries and took sips of the peach-flavored Pitt Cola for a couple of minutes. Then Dipper said, "You know what? I ought to make a _Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained_ video about Mabel."

They finished the burgers and had just about five minutes to spare before their break ended. They used the time to talk over that notion. "It wouldn't be mean," Dipper insisted. "And it wouldn't make fun of Mabel, either. It would just, you know, explain how a girl's moods can shift all of a sudden."

"Oh, man, lame! That's a stereotype," Wendy objected.

With a smile, Dipper countered, "Yeah, but remember I spent a day in Mabel's body. And another one in Pacifica's. I know how mood swings feel, and both of them were swinging like a fence gate in a tornado."

"Ha! Sounds like something McGucket would say," Wendy told him, grinning.

"McGucket's pretty smart, though," Dipper said. "Come on. I'll try to make it gentle and understanding and all that. Something she can look at when she's feeling low, and it'll cheer her up. I'll stress stuff like Mabel's cleverness and her courage, her love for family, the way she outsmarted the Gnomes and the great job she did when she made a memorial portrait of her favorite teacher—"

"Dude, you gotta put in fighting unicorns," Wendy said. "That was epic!"

"And she got the unicorn hair," Dipper said. "And unicorn tears, too!"

"Yeah . . . tears, right," Wendy said. "OK, I guess I've talked myself into it. When do we start?"

"After work today," Dipper said. "We'll have a production meeting and brainstorm a script outline. Mabel will probably come down to her own room after the Shack closes up, and we can use the attic as the studio."

"I hope we don't regret this," Wendy said. "Come on, Dip. Right now, it's time to go back to work."

"Yes, Ms Manager," Dipper said, tossing their trash. "You're the boss!"

"Hey, don't forget that, and we'll always get along fine," Wendy said, but she kissed him to show that she was kidding.

* * *

Gideon and Ulva were on the job, and now that the Ramirez kids were old enough not to demand constant attention, Melody took a turn on the snack-bar cash register, so they didn't miss Mabel too much. As Dipper had predicted, when they closed down everything at six and Soos suggested making a run to Low Main (it was at the bottom of the hill on Main Street, and, yes, it was a Chinese place) for dinner, Dipper went up to ask Mabel what she wanted.

She decided to come downstairs. "Thanks for lending me the bedroom," she said. "I was doing some thinking up there. Talking over my feelings with Darryl."

"With who?" Dipper asked. He hadn't suspected that Mabel had invisible friends—still.

"Up there!" She pointed at a rafter. "The mold spot, remember? I named him Darryl. He's a real patient listener!"

"Sorry, man," Dipper said to the mold spot.

"Hey, Soos!" Mabel said as they went downstairs. "Can I ride along? I never know what I want until I look at their menu!"

"Sure, dude!" Soos said. "You can help me, like, carry the bags!"

Abuelita was the only one who didn't much care for Chinese food, but she warmed up some leftover fajitas, rice, and beans for herself. Dipper and Wendy ordered fried rice, veggie spring rolls, and kung pao chicken, spicy, to share.

The run to the restaurant didn't take long, and around seven everyone sat at the table and passed around the white cardboard cartons. Mabel, as always, used chopsticks, though that was a little problematic with her wonton soup. However, they worked fine with garlic shrimp and veggies. Dipper could sort of use chopsticks. Wendy was a little better than he was, and he thought that maybe, after they were married, he'd ask her to teach him. Mabel used them without much style. More like ramrods than eating utensils.

"They put extra peppers in yours, huh?" Mabel asked her brother, whose face had turned pink and sweaty.

"Little spicier than normal," he said. Wendy didn't show any effects, though, so he toughed it out.

After dinner and the quick clean-up, Mabel said she thought she'd hang in her room and maybe call Teek—it would be nearly eleven PM in Georgia, and she was disappointed that he hadn't called her.

"They keep 'em busy at these orientation sessions, Mabes," Wendy said. "And also, he probably thought you'd be at work in the Shack, remember. If you call him, don't drag it out. He'll need some sleep tonight. Set a time tomorrow when he can call you and you can talk."

"That takes away the spontaneity," Mabel said. "But I guess it's the mature thing to do." She went down the hall toward her room already dialing Teek's number.

Wendy and Dipper went upstairs to the attic. "I didn't tell her I called Teek," Wendy said. She'd done that when Mabel and Soos were out getting the food. "He tried to call her around six, but she didn't have her phone on her. I don't think she even noticed he left her a message. Anyhow, I told him she'd probably call him and for him not to let her know that we'd talked. He's super excited about film school, but I warned him not to talk about that yet. He's gonna be asking her how she did."

"Thanks, Wen," Dipper said.

"No problem. Just trying to smooth out the course of true love."

In the attic, he pulled a box from under Mabel's old bed. "I think maybe there's something here—these are clothes that Mabel outgrew and just left here I think back before our fourteenth birthday—yeah, this is it."

He stood up, holding a red turtleneck sweater, hand-knitted and a little faded with years, with an appliqué of a shooting star trailing a rainbow on the front. "Oh, man!" Wendy said. "That's her trademark! She's still got one like this."

"She makes another one about every year," Dipper said. "This is the first one, the one she had when we were twelve." He held it against him and looked down. "Were we ever this small?"

"Oh, yeah, you were a real shrimp at twelve," Wendy said, laughing.

"No wonder you shoved me off the log and said we needed to stay just friends."

"Yeah." She sat on his bed and patted the mattress. He sat beside her. "But that was before all that doomsday crap with Weirdmageddon. I think that's when I started looking at you a little different, you know."

He nodded. Right. He hadn't realized it at the time, but Wendy, still dazed from the rollover of their hijacked car after the jump across the gorge, had heard what Dipper had told Gideon, leader of the Discount Auto Warriors at that moment—"If I've learned anything this summer, it's that you can't force someone to love you. The best you can do is strive to be someone worthy of loving."

"You both did a lot of growing since that summer," Wendy said, touching the sweater. "She got a lot better at knitting, too. This one was always kinda baggy on her."

"Well, it was the first one she made," Dipper said. "I think we'll go with this as the title card. Hang on, I'll set up the camera."

He did, using the tripod, and then after looking up something in his current journal, Dipper wrote a title on a piece of cardboard. "Let's put the sweater over the back of this chair," he told Wendy. They pulled it over, flattening and straightening the shooting-star emblem.

He switched on the camera, though he didn't start the recording, and lined up the shot. "OK, Wendy, I'm gonna hold the title card up. I'll nod when I want you to start recording—"

"Is this the way you and Mabel all shot those 'Guide to' videos?"

"Yep," Dipper said. "And I still have all the outtakes stored on my laptop. I'm going to use some of them in this video."

"What were you reading in your Journal just now?"

"Looking up the last video I did. See, I number them all—the first digit is the season. This is the sixth season—and this is the eighteenth video—so—"

He held up the card reading

* * *

DIPPER'S GUIDE TO THE UNEXPLAINED

# 618:

UNDERSTANDING MABEL

* * *

"Annnd . . . we're rolling." Dipper nodded, Wendy hit the START button, and they began the project.


	2. Chapter 2

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 3-4, 2017)**

* * *

**2: Sorting It Out**

Dipper had done a dastardly act.

Well, no, he didn't. He was Dipper. But he had snuck Mabel's first scrapbook upstairs so he and Wendy could go through it for ideas.

Maybe on some calm or blustery evening, you and your loved one have sat together leafing through a memory book—photo album, diary of one or the other's freshman year at college, collection of memorabilia, or scrapbook—and known the warm glow of "Oh, I remember that!" "We had such a good time!" "We thought the ghosts were going to kill us!"

Maybe not that last one, but that's because you didn't grow up in, or spend your teenage summers in, Gravity Falls, Oregon. Anyway, Dipper and Wendy chuckled, groaned, or murmured over the pages in that first scrapbook.

"What's this?" Wendy asked, pointing to a tuft of white fibers tied with a pink string and taped to an early page in the scrapbook.

"Um, Gnome beard hair," Dipper said.

"Ew! Why'd she save this?"

"I told you about that. Remember Norman?"

"I never met him, but, yeah, I remember. Mabel's first epic summer romance, right? Steve and four other Gnomes in a hoodie they'd ripped off from the dump."

"Right. Well, it ended kind of rough. I borrowed the golf cart—"

"Heh! I thought you were, like, sneaking off from work or some deal. I was kinda proud of you, Dip!"

"Yeah, but I was really going to rescue Mabel. Man, I had that figured out so wrong. I was sure Norman was a zombie—"

"Dude, I read your novel," Wendy said.

Oh, right. Dipper's first book—written, improbably, when he was fifteen, edited by Wendy and his Grunkle Ford, accepted, published, and successfully sold by a major New York publisher, was _Bride of the Zombie, _by "Stan X. Mason." It retold—well, mostly, because every work of fiction contains some truth but a whole lot of baloney, too—it retold, basically, Dipper and Mabel's first adventure with Gravity Falls weirdness, except it changed things so the "Palms" twins lived in Oregon and went to visit their con-artist great-uncle "Manny" in Granite Rapids, California—baloney. But the little creatures kidnapped the sister, the brother rescued her, pretty much what had happened.

"Anyway," Dipper said, "I followed them into the woods. Soos gave me a shovel to fight the zombies—he thought that's what Norman was, too—and a baseball bat."

"For Gnomes," Wendy said.

"Um, no. In case I ran into a piñata. Anyhow, we had to fight Jeff and Shmebulock and a bunch of other Gnomes, and Mabel wound up with a tuft of beard hair." Dipper paused. "Boring story."

They remembered other stuff as they turned the pages: the Gobblewonker expedition—Mabel had photos of the two of them, Stan, and Soos's stomach out on the lake, plus two photos Dipper had finally, successfully snapped of the Gobblewonker lodged in the mouth of the cave behind Trembley Falls (not that the locals called it that—it was just the Falls, or, redundantly, Gravity Falls Falls to most of them).

"That was Fiddleford's robot," Dipper said. "He claims he saw a real lake monster there, though. Of course, that was back when he was zapping himself with the Memory Eraser practically once a day, so I don't know if there's really a Gobblewonker in the lake or not."

"Ew," Wendy said. "Dude, this cave is where those gel things were. The ones that tried to absorb us."

"I've thought about going back to check on them," Dipper said. "But—I don't want to."

"I agree. Let sleeping monsters lie."

A newspaper clipping with Li'l Gideon strolling along a town street, holding hands with Mabel, who was trying unsuccessfully to hide her face. A photo of Knuckles, the lobster that Mabel had rescued and had briefly kept as a pet ("He just won't learn to heel!" she had often complained) before her Grunkles had returned the crustacean to the sea.

An empty packet of Smile Dip, and a sketch of Aoshima, the flying man-dolphin-thing that Mabel remembered from her lovely dream, or Smile Dip-induced hallucination, or whatever it was. And—ugh—a photo of Dipper, age five, in a lamb costume. "That's so humiliating," he said.

"Dude, you're cute doing the Lamby Lamby Dance!" Wendy said. "Even when I was all crouched up in that case on the ceiling of the Dusk2Dawn, even when the ghosts were ranting about how teenagers were evil and junk, when you started doing that little dance in that cute costume with the ears and the tail—oh, man, I could have just snuggled you to death. You were cuter than a panda duck!"

"I am not going to do the Lamby Lamby Dance on our wedding night," Dipper said.

She snuggled against him and sent him a thought and a very provocative mental image: _I could make it worth your while!_

"Umm . . . we'll talk about it." Dipper turned the page.

They could have leafed through Journal 3 just as easily. Ford had begun it, but it had been left half-finished, and Dipper—with occasional help from Mabel—had taken it up and had left a record of everything the twins had done that summer of 2012. Mabel's scrapbook was more random, but it gave them a better insight into her and what she held dear.

"No!" Dipper said, covering a photo with the palm of his hand. "Why?"

"Let me see," Wendy said, giggling, forcing him to move his hand. "Mermando? What are you guys doing?"

"I'm giving him reverse CPR!" Dipper said. "This is not a kiss! He was stranded on land, and I was forcing water through his gills to save him from suffocating, that's all! I was a lifeguard, after all! Assistant lifeguard."

"Yeah, man, you couldn't swim at all back then," Wendy said. "Lucky Poolcheck liked your sunblock, or you'd never have been accepted. We had a fun couple of days, didn't we?"

Dipper had to chuckle. "You threw Grunkle Stan in pool jail!"

"Hey, he was rough-housing," Wendy said. "I'm lucky he didn't hold a grudge, though. When Poolcheck booted me, next day I showed up at the Shack and Stan acted like I'd never walked off from my cashier's job. Saved me from being banished to my cousin Steve's logging camp."

"Why did you hate that camp so much?"

"Let me see. I was fifteen and a girl. The guys at the camp ranged from twenty to forty, and all of them, including my cousin, were horny as hell and crude about it. Any questions?"

"Sorry I asked!"

"Yeah, this picture makes me think of the time when Mermando wanted help getting his manatee wife back after she'd been captured. We nearly died that time. The water was so cold."

"Do you remember the helicopter rescuing us?"

"Man, I was out of it. All that I really remember after falling out of the boat was comin' out of it in that hospital room in that stupid robe that left my butt hanging out. And you and I took a nice hot shower together. I remember that part real well."

"Oh, yeah," Dipper said, grinning. Nearly drowning had been worth it. They hadn't done anything sexual, really—recovering from acute hypothermia dulls physical lust—but pressing close to Wendy beneath the hot spray of water had been—

_I liked it, too,_ Wendy said to him mentally.

—_I wouldn't mind a nice long shower on our wedding night!_

_It's a date, Dipper. Meet me under the shower head!_

They went through the whole scrapbook—Sev'ral Timez! Gabe the puppeteer! The lyrics for "Taking Over Midnight!" A label from a can of beans, the sustenance of the Shapeshifter in the bunker for thirty years! A list of "Rebound Crushes" for Dipper that Mabel had prepared when it looked as though his crush on Wendy had been quashed! Dipper shook his head at that one. "Lazy Susan? Really?"

"Well," Wendy teased, "Mabes knew you had a thing for older women."

"Mabes was wrong," Dipper said.

As they leafed through, Dipper paused to jot down ideas for the video—things they had to be sure to include.

Waddles, oh, of course, Waddles. Mabel's soul mate.

The scrap of paper she'd folded into a hat, incidentally revealing a map that led to the discovery of Quentin Trembley and the realization that being silly wasn't a failing, but more of a superpower.

A blob of wax—"WAX SHAKESPEARE'S NOSE," the handwritten caption said.

All that stuff, and more.

"Dude," Wendy said, "you get the feeling this is a clip show?"

* * *

Clandestinely, they shot footage:

DIPPER: Allow me to introduce my sister, Mabel Pines. This photo was taken of us in May of 2012. We were twelve years old. That sweater that Mabel is wearing was the first one she ever knitted. When I see it, or see that shooting-star emblem, it reminds me of how brilliant and offbeat she is—and how lucky I am as a brother.

An outtake from one of Mabel's Guide series:

MABEL: The world is divided into Order and Chaos. (Image: Dipper bent over a table, making a list). Order gets things done on time. (Image: Mabel, in shades, dancing with Waddles, standing on two legs and wearing a sombrero). But Chaos has more fun!

The conclusion to an abortive Dipper's Guide entry:

(The image shows the floor of the Shack and a door, sideways because the camera has fallen off the tripod)

MABEL: It's not a possum! It's not a possum!

When they looked at that footage, Wendy said, "Man, what was that thing?"

Dipper said, "We never really found out. It was sort of a bug-man, I guess? Anyhow, we chased it around the Shack. It got into the parlor, ducked into the fireplace, and scrambled up the chimney. That was the last we saw of it."

(A shot of two cloth hats, resting on the table. The right one says, "MABEL," the left one "DIPPY.")

DIPPER: These are fishing hats that our Grunkle Stan made for us when we went to our first Fishing Opener. Those letters were applied with hand stitching. You can kind of tell from the spelling that at that time Stan felt closer to Mabel than he did to me. That's OK. We hadn't known him long then, and I have to admit, Mabel can be pretty adorable!

In little fits and starts, in short scenes, _Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained #618: Understanding Mabel _began to shape up.

* * *

And meanwhile, out in Georgia, where August can be suffocatingly hot and humid:

Teek was grateful for air-conditioning. He and fifty-nine other entering freshman sat in the Nesheim Auditorium and watched clips of the past year's senior film projects. To his relief, he kept thinking _I could do better than that._

His mother had not come with him onto campus—she had ventured up into Atlanta and was presumably exploring Peachtree Street or someplace. He had been introduced to a few of the other incoming students: Tom Cater, an intense, motor-mouthed guy from New York—specifically "Brooklyn," which he kept insisting on; Dale Devery, a pretty girl from Winter Garden, Florida, whose ambition, she said, was to work on animated films; Mignette Valchon, from Quebec, who was interested in film acting.

The school looked exciting, though—Teek had to admit—unexpectedly regimented. First semester: Writing 1, Introduction to Cinema, Mathematics 1, History of Film, Gender Studies. It was a pretty rigid track—though having taken four placement tests now, Teek felt confident that he could exempt at least Math 1 and possibly Introduction to Cinema. He had read deeply enough on film terms, techniques, and critical approaches to have zipped through the placement test on that one.

If he did manage two exemptions, he might actually even be able to go into Screenwriting 1 or Cinematography 1 in his first term—that would make things more interesting.

In the cool theater that August afternoon, Teek saw about fifteen clips from senior projects. They had a few things in common: Flashy camera or animation techniques (unnecessary, he thought, nine times out of ten), earnest storylines (doesn't anybody think to do a comedy?), and metaphors so abstract they actually made him lose bits and pieces of the movie as his concentration slipped. The leader of the session, Dr. Reed—she was in her fifties, he guessed, and she had written six films he remembered having seen—showed only one student film in its entirety, the winner of the annual competition. It was twenty-two minutes long and was entitled _Rose._

It began in a cool month. The protagonist, a girl in her late teens, planted a small sprig of a rose bush.

And the rest of the film was made up of snippets of her daily life—she worked in a greeting-card store, she had some friends whom she laughed with, a guy she dated, a mom she lived with—but each little scenic arc ended with her caring for the growing rosebush.

Time passed. She dealt with insect pests. She gently turned down her boyfriend's suggestion of a proposal. She took care of her mom when her mom came down with the flu. Little things, daily things. Chrissy—the girl—had no great adventure, no heartbreak, no elation. Still, Teek began to know who she was—an average, kind, gentle girl, not beautiful, not homely. She had an air of calm about her, quiet and understated.

But when a windstorm ripped the rose bush in the summer, she wept. All the flowers were stripped of petals. However, Chrissy straightened the canes, tied them to supports, and continued to care for the damaged plant.

One beautiful red rose remained, as it turned out. And one morning she clipped it, put it in a tube of water, and set off. The camera followed her as she boarded a bus. It caught people sending her admiring or quizzical glances. It showed her getting off the bus in a suburban setting and walking down what seemed about to turn into a country lane.

Then she stopped, looking down.

She knelt and placed the single rose in an urn before a tombstone.

She said simply, "Happy birthday, Dad."

Teek blinked. The film had grabbed his feelings without his fully realizing it. Life goes on, but it's good to remember the past. Simple message, simple images, complex feelings.

He applauded, and the other students joined in.

Yeah. That was the way to do it. That film had something real and heartfelt in it. It didn't need flashy cinematography, special effects, or intense acting. It . . . just did its job and did it well.

They'd be done with that day's session at five—Eastern time.

He'd call Mabel five minutes after that, at 2:05 Oregon time. She would be at work in the Shack, but he had to call.

Because he had to tell her what he'd seen.

Now he was certain.

That—_that _kind of film making—was what he wanted to do.


	3. Chapter 3

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 3-4, 2017)**

* * *

**3: Red Tape**

They say bad marriages are easy, but good ones are hard work. Maybe that was a good omen.

Wendy and Dipper made their_ second _trip to City Hall on Friday morning at nine. Their first visit had found the county clerk out, the assistant busy, and showed them that they had a lot of paperwork to do. "You can do it on the computer," the assistant said helpfully. "If you want to make an appointment, the County Clerk can deal with your application on—" she checked her own computer—"this Friday, nine A.M. Be on time!"

That same afternoon, up in Dipper's room, sitting in two wooden chairs side by side with his laptop on the table Dipper used as a desk, they took care of the application online. "Who knew it would be this complicated?" Wendy asked.

For the record, anyone wishing to be married in Oregon must be at least 18, or 17 with special consent of a parent or guardian. They must be able to pony up sixty dollars in cash, plus an extra $7.75 for a certified copy of the marriage certificate. That had substantially increased since the old days—McGucket had once told him that he'd got a special marriage license for five dollars. Of course, that was for one of Roadkill County's special licenses, the one that allowed you to marry a woodpecker or other creature of a non-human species.

Oregon doesn't require a blood test or—fortunately for Dipper—legal residence in the state from its applicants, but it does require both bride and groom to supply the current address (Wendy's was the Shack, but she left off the name of the building and recorded just the address, 618 Gopher Road), plus the date of birth, plus the_ place_ of birth. Since the rules required that one bring in a birth certificate (though, come to that, Roadkill County marriage laws were a bit hazy about whether zombies and vampires needed birth certificates), Wendy referred to hers to answer these questions.

However, just to be sure about some of the details she called her dad: He told her that her place of birth was Elwood Hospital, which had been in Morris; at the time of her birth, Gravity Falls had no clinic or hospital. She'd never heard of the place, and told him so, and he explained that Elwood Hospital no longer existed—it had merged with a larger health-care facility in 2000.

And then she had to ask her father's full name—Daniel Louis Corduroy—and his birthplace. Lord knows why they needed that, but he answered proudly: "Finnegan's Lumber Camp, Shevlin, Oregon. In the cook shack, if you want to be specific. It was rainin' on that day, and my mama didn't want it to happen in a leaky tent" And her mother's maiden name—Amanda Jane Blerble, born in Swedish Hospital, Seattle, Washington. "Was she Swedish?" Wendy asked, surprised.

"Naw, American," Dan said, sounding equally surprised. "That's just the name of a hospital. You know, when the cat has kittens in the oven, they don't turn out to be biscuits."

"Why would a cat have—"

"Cats is strange animals, baby girl!"

Dan had no real information about the Blerble family, since they had virtually disowned their daughter and never spoke to their son-in-law. Once Wendy tried looking up the Blerble surname on the web, but all references went to the lumber company her maternal great-grandfather had built into a major business.

Funny thing about that last name. While she was growing up, for some reason she couldn't even remember now, Wendy always assumed that her middle initial stood for "Barbara," and Dan never corrected her. Because for many years she had never actually seen her birth certificate, even when she entered high school, and because Dan harbored a stubborn grudge against his wife's family and never once mentioned them by name, Wendy hadn't learned her mother's maiden name until just a couple of years ago, when one day to her shock Dan had told her, "Remember, your mother was a Blerble."

That day she'd been a little tipsy on beer—OK, she was blind drunk, because Dan had plied her with beer in order to worm information about her boyfriend from her—and for a ghastly day or so, she'd mistakenly thought he'd said "gerbil," and she'd feared that just maybe she was descended from one of Gravity Falls's bizarre marriages. After all, one guy in town had a rocky marriage to a woodpecker, and for a while, Old Man McGucket had been married—on paper—to a raccoon. She thought in a panic that it was possible her grandfather on her mother's side might have been a small furry lab animal. In Gravity Falls, who knew?

But, no, the Blerbles were a wealthy family in the lumber trade, though they did cut ties with Amanda when she married a plain, ornery, enormous blue-collar (well, technically flannel-collar) lumberjack of whom they disapproved.

Anyway, Dipper had to supply the same information about his parents. His address, in Piedmont, California, his place of birth, in Piedmont, California, his father's full name and place of birth, in Piedmont, California, and his mother's maiden name (Collins) and place of birth, just to make it exciting, in San Francisco, California.

The online application sternly warned them to bring proof of identity—a driver's license would do—as well as a certified birth certificate.

"The birth certificate should be enough," Wendy grumbled.

"You have your driver's license now," Dipper pointed out.

"Yeah, but the picture makes me look goofy."

Dipper grinned. "Everybody's driver's license does that. I got a little mad when I had my photo taken—they wouldn't let me wear the fur trapper's hat." He took out his wallet and showed her.

"You do look pissed!" Wendy said, laughing. "Hey, part of your birthmark shows."

"Not very much, though," Dipper said. "It could be a zit. Oh, well, in another couple of years I have to get a new license. We'll be married then and I'll look happier."

Wendy showed him hers.

I mean her license, you perv.

He smiled. "I think you look adorable."

Truthfully, in the photo she looked a bit dim, because she'd started to blink and had opened her mouth to say "Wait!" So there she was with her eyes half-closed and her mouth hanging open. "Hey," she said, "can I get a new license in California? I want a do-over."

"We'll look it up," Dipper said. "Anyway, the license bureau demands two forms of ID so they'll know we're us."

Putting away her driver's license, Wendy said, "You know, I feel like for our second ID, we ought to write down that on your forehead you've got a birthmark in the shape of the Big Dipper and I've got one like a little pink heart on my butt cheek."

"No, no, no! They might want to see them," Dipper said. "And I want yours to be private between you and me. Let's stick with the drivers' licenses."

The application warned them that the wedding could not take place for three calendar days following the issuing of the license, and that it must take place within sixty days, or the license had to be renewed.

And, since Dipper was seventeen, he needed a consent form, yada yada yada.

They had all the red-tape stuff they needed, and they took it all with them to the City Hall on Friday morning. The office was in the basement of the building, down a hall lined with filing cabinets and into a room lit with the bright fluorescent fixtures. This time the County Clerk, Mrs. Aribel Mecklin, was in. She was a thin woman with gray hair into which she kept sticking pencils. From a short distance she resembled a living pincushion. She took the application materials and proved herself the slowest typist west of the Rockies. Remember that sloth in the rabbit-cop movie? It was faster than she was.

She slowly made photocopies of the copies of birth certificate and the original drivers' licenses, she stapled the consent form—only one of Dipper's parents really had to sign it, and he'd expected that would be his dad, because Wanda Pines still would murmur sadly, "You're both so young" when the subject of the wedding came up.

But his mom had surprised him. She signed the consent form together with Alex, and her signature came first. When he showed it to Wendy, he said, "Mom wrote her name on the consent form, look. So I guess we have to go through with this."

Shaking her head dolefully, Wendy had replied, "Yeah, man, no escape now."

Mrs. Mecklin slowly explained—three times running, in the exact same words each time—that they would need to take the marriage license to the officiant, who is the person who would perform the wedding ceremony, it could be a minister, a priest, a rabbi, anyone ordained by a real religion, actually, or a judge, justice of the peace . . ..

Oh, yes, they would need two witnesses, friends were fine, they had to be at least eighteen, they didn't have to be residents of Oregon, but they needed to record and show proof of their names and addresses . . ..

Anyway, the officiant had to complete filling out the license once the ceremony had taken place. He or she would then return the signed and dated license to the county clerk's office, it would be registered with the state, and either the groom or the bride or both could pick up a certified copy of the license—which, hocus-pocus, had now been transformed into a Marriage Certificate—as legal proof of their union. Wendy and Dipper could get an official copy by coming into the county clerk's office or—simpler—by mailing in a request. "We only accept checks for the mail-in request," Mrs. Mecklin warned. And repeated twice. "Where's my pencil?" she asked, looking on her desk.

All twelve were sticking in her hair. Wendy pointed that out, and she pulled one out to make a note. "How did that get there?" she asked, staring at the yellow pencil as if it were a mischievous living creature. "Oh, well, Gravity Falls."

It was a good thing they'd completed the initial application online, because with Mrs. Mecklin's fastidious deliberation and glacial typing, the process that both Wendy and Dipper had thought would take twenty minutes instead completely filled an hour.

The Shack was busy when they got back a few minutes past ten, and they immediately went to work, but without even asking, Mabel opened the manila envelope and, her eyes huge, said, "It's really happening! Hey, everybody! Patrons of the Mystery Shack! Employees and bossees! Look at this! Look at this! Our little Dipper Pines and our beautiful Wendy Corduroy just got their wedding license! They're going to be married! Mazel tov!"

Soos took the certificate and looked at it and the copies of the application, wiping away a tear. Hoarsely, he said, "This is so beautiful, dawgs. Congratulations. I hope you're as happy as—oh, dudes I remember so good when me and Melody went to the clerk's office—excuse me." He turned away, fishing a handkerchief from his pocket and honking his nose.

Wendy took Dipper's hand_. He was looking at the application form_. _You know what he's thinking?_

—_He doesn't know his father's birthplace._

_Yeah._

Soos's dad—an absentee dad, who left home suddenly one day when his only son was four, departing not long before some law-enforcement officers arrived—anyway, Mr. Finster had just vanished. From then on, except for sporadic postcards, usually timed to arrive around Soos's birthday, he was never a part of Soos's life.

Well, he wasn't until, still on the run (this time from some gamblers whom he owed), Mr. Finster had come to Gravity Falls one cold winter day to "borrow" some money from Soos. He'd been mortally ill even then, and months later he had died of natural causes, still on the run, up in Canada. Soos and Melody, with the silent financial help of Grunkle Stan, had given him a decent burial and had paid for his final medical bills.

Yeah, any mention of his father had an emotional effect on Soos, making him gloomy and weepy. Fortunately, before long he would cheer up, realizing that he was supremely happy as a husband to Melody and—never say that you can't learn better from bad examples—he was a doting, loving father to his two (so far) kids.

Oh, well. Wendy and Dipper had to grin and blush and thank everyone as the customers checked out or friends congratulated them. Ulva, the werewolf, sniffed the marriage license. "It smells so official," she said appreciatively.

"Hey, congratulations, you two," Gideon told them. "Wendy, Dipper's a lucky guy to be marryin' you. Dipper, you treat her good, 'cause if you don't, she might take and break your arm for you!"

"I just might," Wendy agreed mildly. "After all, I'm a flippin' Corduroy."

"Oh, say, that reminds me," Gideon said. "Mind if I tell Ghost Eyes the happy news? He'd like to know."

Wendy glanced at Dipper, who shrugged. "OK with me."

"Sure, what the heck," Wendy said. "He ever finish his Master's?"

"Oh, yeah, he's a marketing assistant with Bullseye, Incorporated," Gideon said. "He's off in the big city of Portland!"

"Tell him we said hi," Dipper added.

Mabel kept ducking in and out, and Dipper suspected she was up to something. But with a gift shop temporarily full of tourists whose pockets were temporarily full of money, he didn't really have time to ask her.

Lunch was another rushed twenty-minute deal, but because so many of the tourists were enjoying the snack bar, Mabel was able to slip away with Wendy and Dipper to the break room, where she kept sneaking fries off her brother's plate, though she had a generous helping on her own.

"Hear from Teek?" Wendy asked her.

"Yeah, we had a long face-to-face on the phone earlier today. He's really enjoying the campus tour and all," Mabel said, coming down a little from the high the marriage license had given her. "I know he's gonna do great. I just wish he wasn't gonna be doing it so far away!"

"Make plans to see him every time he gets a break," Dipper advised. "Try to arrange your schedule so you don't have Friday classes. You could fly out to Atlanta on a Thursday evening, spend Friday and Saturday with Teek, and then come back on Sunday."

"Three problems with that. Money, money, and money," Mabel said, reaching for another of Dipper's fries.

"You're paying a lot less for rent than you'd planned," Dipper pointed out. "Put the savings in a special account. A romance account!"

"Hey, yeah," Wendy said. "Good idea. And also join like a frequent-flyer program. What's that airline that's based in Atlanta?"

"Delta," Dipper said. "They have flights from Portland and Oakland. There's not a real big airport in Crescent City, and no big airline flies out of there, but Mabel could catch a commuter flight from Del Norte Airport to Oakland, and from there take a Delta flight on to Atlanta."

"I'll explore that," Mabel said. "I can just see me, flying all the way across the country to visit my sweetie. Do you suppose Delta would charge me extra for barf bags?"

"Knowing you," Dipper said with a smile, "I'd say that's a definite possibility."

Mabel said that as plans stood, Teek and his mom should land in Portland around eleven on Sunday morning. "I'm going to meet Teek and drive him back, and I'm throwing together a welcome-home party" she told Wendy and Dipper. "Not much, 'cause there's no time, but we'll have some friends over."

While she started counting off a series of names long enough to be the voter rolls in Roadkill County, Wendy sent Dipper a raised-eyebrow look. He nodded, subtly.

If they were going to surprise Mabel with a video, and if they'd wanted the ideal audience assembled for it, they'd have to hurry up and finish it. When Mabel threw even a small party, she put into it almost the same effort that Grant had used to take Vicksburg.


	4. Chapter 4

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 3-4, 2017)**

* * *

**4\. The Difficulties of Coming Out of the Closet**

There are those who live a strange kind of half-life, keeping a part—most, sometimes—of themselves hidden away. Who knows what they fear? Exposure, ridicule, reactions of disgust or even of horror, if others should see the side of themselves they choose to leave hidden away.

Though none of the others who lived in the Shack suspected it, one of them was such a closeted individual. At a time when everything seemed once again to be on the verge of irreversible change—marriage, college, everything—the tensions in the Shack rose, no matter what public face everyone put on their feelings. Maybe that was the impetus—maybe that was what lay behind the urge to step out of the closet and take whatever consequences might come.

No one could say for sure.

On the evening of August 3, Wendy and Dipper finished shooting the footage for the short video—not quite five minutes long—which took a look at the mysteries of Mabel. "I think we got enough for me to cut into the finished product," Dipper said.

Wendy yawned. It was one in the morning. "When you gonna do that, Dip?"

"I figure I'll get a start on it tomorrow night, finish it while Mabel drives over to Portland to meet Teek and his mom."

"Is she really gonna do that, all by herself? I mean, Teek's mom drove their car—"

"Mabel says she can't wait," Dipper told her. "And Teek will drive back with her. I think she'll be OK. She's had lots of practice driving."

"Well," Wendy said, "as long as it's not pouring rain or foggy or anything!"

But the forecast said no rain was in the offing, and though you never could tell about traffic, Mabel had become a better driver since her sixteenth birthday. In fact, she'd had fewer close calls and fender benders than Grunkle Stan used to cause before his cataract condition improved. Stan in fact offered to drive her over, but she declined—"I want some alone time with Teek," she said.

"Tell him to keep both hands on the wheel," Stan advised. "Much safer that way."

"Grunkle Stan!" Mabel said sharply. "Teek's never had a traffic accident in his life!"

"Who said anything about traffic accidents?" Stan grumped.

So she planned to leave early on Sunday morning for the two-hour-and-a-bit drive to the Portland airport, where Teek and his mother would land at around 10:30 AM. Dipper figured that if he got up at seven, he'd have a clear five hours to edit five minutes out of all the shooting they'd done and all the archival stuff he'd dug up out of the outtakes from previous Dipper's and Mabel's Guides.

Saturday, though, kept them busy. At the end of the day, Wendy and Dipper invited Mabel to go out for dinner—"We're thinking of driving out of the Valley to the Farmhouse," Wendy said. That was a family restaurant located on the picturesque bank of the Deschutes River. From the patio out back, you had a great view of the river valley and the Triple Falls, really more of a series of three rapids close together. The food was good and the atmosphere relaxed—but Mabel shook her head.

"Thanks, but I think Teek and me will go out somewhere for a special meal after he gets back," she said. "I'm just not in the mood. Plus, I want to get extra sleep so tomorrow I'll wake up supercharged!"

"The world as we know it may not survive that," Dipper said.

So it was just Dipper and Wendy for dinner. As they sat on the patio in the warm light of a fading August day, Wendy asked, "Gonna work on the video?"

"No, let it rest tonight," Dipper said. "Plenty of time tomorrow morning. I have the continuity worked out, and there's just a couple minutes of voiceover script. Um—you think we ought to show this privately to Mabel first?"

Wendy laughed. "Definitely not! Mabel doesn't embarrass, Dip—she rejoices in her own eccentricities!"

"That's a very collegiate way of putting it!" Dipper said. "I'd say she glories in goofiness."

"Well, I'm practicing for this fall," Wendy said.

"Hope we get the schedules we asked for," Dipper told her. "It would be nice to be in at least one class together."

That had become problematic because Wendy, who hadn't been too sure that she would even be accepted at Dipper's choice of University, had spent a couple of years accumulating credits at a community college not far from the Valley. She'd done well and in fact would be entering Western Alliance not as a freshman, but as a sophomore. Dipper had taken placement tests that might allow him to exempt a few courses—he was almost sure that he could go at least into second-term English, for example. After all, he had written some successful YA novels. And he'd taken advanced-placement mathematics and had done very well, so he hoped he could go into Calculus I in college.

That was one course that he and Wendy might be able to share. Wendy was OK in math—it wasn't her strongest subject—but together, with their mental link allowing him to coach her, Dipper thought that they could get through the course with flying colors.

Still, his wife would be a lofty sophomore while he would be a lowly freshman, and too many of his courses would be ones that Wendy had already taken, or their equivalents. Look on the bright side—she could tutor him!

"Real pretty this evening," Wendy said, gazing out over the river and toward the rapids.

"We ought to picnic sometime at Cline Falls State Park," Dipper said. "Soos tells me it's a great spot. You know it?"

"Know _of_ it," Wendy said. "There's so many places not far from the Valley that I've never been! I guess it's like people in New York never going to the Statue of Liberty. We ought to make a list."

Dipper said, "I may be a bad influence on you!"

"Yeah, yeah," Wendy said good-naturedly. "You make me more disciplined, I'll make you more reckless."

"Sounds like a deal!" Dipper said.

He paid the check and Wendy said, "Movie night? We could even go to my house if you want. The guys are off at some bowling tourney until early tomorrow morning."

"Um . . ." Dipper said, "yeah, but—well, since you moved out, I feel kinda funny going there. Do you know what I mean?"

"Oh, sure," Wendy said. "Sort of like now I just visit when I go over there. At least Dad's got a lady coming in every other day to pick up and clean, though. But I get you. Well, if you don't want to see a movie at the Shack, there's always—"

"Lookout Point?" Dipper asked.

Wendy giggled. "Man, we're not even holding hands and you read my mind! Though come to think of it, Lookout Point is kind of a teen make-out place, and I'm technically not a teen any longer."

"Yeah, but I am," Dipper pointed out. "If you add our ages together and divide by two—"

"We average out to teens!" Wendy said. "You talked me into it. Usual rules?

That meant some prohibitions against too many clothes coming off . . . for one thing.

"Mental make-0ut," he promised.

"Dude, leave a good tip and let's go!"

* * *

Some people are lucky. They know exactly what they want and also have a good idea of how to go about getting it.

Others—not so much. Though they really should be confident and clear, they go through life conflicted and confused. Now and then one decides to do something about that.

But it's not easy, coming out of the closet.

That night in the Shack—not very late, because Wendy and Dipper hadn't yet returned, but late enough for Soos and Melody to be on the edge of sleep, for the kids to be snoozing, and for Abuelita to be sleeping and dreaming of her grandchildren—Mabel was snoring. It wasn't a bandsaw buzz, but her usual muttering snore, punctuated by her soft sleep-talking complaints: "But how would we raise the children, Gnome or Human?" and that sort of thing.

But running through the peace was a psychic urgency.

_I can do this. Everyone will accept me. I've seen enough of them to know that._

And a conflicting counter-urgency:

_What will my mother and father think? I might not ever be able to see my family or friends again!_

_But I can't go on like this—not hiding away, not wishing I could join in like everyone else._

_I think I can do this. It's a good night for it, almost the best. I can't stand living like this any longer._

_I think I have to do this._

* * *

Some places lie squarely on the border between Reality and Unreality. One is the Outhouse of Mystery. It is a kind of permanent Portal that works a bit like a paranormal elevator. It has a duplicate far below the surface, in the cavernous Crawlspace that sprawls beneath a significant part of the Valley, with branches beneath part of the Shack's land and part of the town of Gravity Falls.

These structures were constructed from a special variety of timber, Resonating Pearwood. The Outhouse warps both time and space—if you venture into it and remain for more than a minute or two, when you come back out, hours may have passed. Or if you perform the right ritual, you have the sensation of having pushed the down button on a very fast express elevator and you wind up in the Crawlspace, waist-deep in monsters.

The monsters, who use the Outhouse as one of their entrances to the Crawlspace, tried to prevent humans from discovering the truth (they hadn't counted on Stanford Pines, who could figure almost everything out eventually). To protect their privacy, the monsters cast terrible curses on the Outhouse.

One was the Curse of Unbearable Stench. Humans stepping into the enclosure reeled from the overpowering smell, which was pretty much what you would imagine, but cranked up to fifteen.

The other was the Curse of the Following Wisp, which meant that if you went inside and actually used it as an outhouse—and nobody, monster or human, knew where the waste products, we'll call them, went, except it certainly wasn't down into the Crawlspace. They might have been dematerialized or shunted into the Bottomless Pit.

However, the second curse insured that anyone who spent more than a minute inside the Outhouse of Mystery would exit trailing a two- to three-foot length of toilet paper from one of his or her heels. And this occurred even if the outhouse _had no toilet paper inside it to begin with!_

The monsters had discovered that no human can endure walking around with toilet paper trailing from his or her shoe. It was a diabolically clever curse.

We're off the track here. The significant thing is that Boyish Dan Corduroy, way back in his pre-bearded, pre-married late-teen years, had constructed the basic structure that later became the Mystery Shack. And though he was already an accomplished carpenter and did a splendid, sturdy job, he made one mistake.

See, the Shack was originally Stanford Pines's home. He'd bought the land from Old Man Northwest, who neglected to tell him that, as the result of an epic flood back in the 19th Century, several hundred bodies had been washed out of a graveyard and reburied under tons of mud flows right where the house was to be built. Dipper discovered that fact when he inadvertently raised the dead, though he had specifically promised Mabel not to do that.

In addition to being built atop a patch of ground that had potential zombies laced through it like raisins in a rum-raisin cake, there was the matter of Dan's one mistake.

Because Stanford relied on a wood stove (it was iron, but it burned wood, because a wood wood stove is only good for one use) for heat, he'd had Dan build an attic room that could double as a bedroom. In the hot summers, Stanford slept downstairs in the room that Soos found much later—the one with the electron carpet. But in the cold winters, he wanted an attic bedroom because heat rises.

And Dan lined the closet in this bedroom with what he thought were thin cedar planks.

They weren't. They were a few pieces of Resonating Pearwood, which is almost identical to high-grade cedar.

For six summers now, Dipper Pines had slept within a few steps of another mysterious enclosure.

He was in for a surprise.

The Invisible Wizard was on the verge of coming out of the closet.


	5. Chapter 5

_Author's note: I apologize for the interruption. A respiratory infection has been making the rounds of my family, and early this week I came down with it. It developed into acute bronchitis, which resulted in a trip to the doctor, which resulted in my going to the hospital to ward off pneumonia. After spending Thanksgiving Day turkeyless and in a hospital bed, I'm back home now (my wife saved me some turkey and dressing) and feeling better. This note will auto-destruct with the next update._

* * *

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 4, 2017)**

* * *

**5\. The Dilemma of a Closet Wizard**

* * *

"Yukkoph is a peculiar dim orb beyond the outmost rim of our known solar system. Despite its location, it has enough inner conducted and radiative heat from an active core to have warmth, enough mass (it is larger than four of our Earths) to maintain an atmosphere, and enough deep brooding time behind it to have produced Life. There are bizarre but mighty cities on Yukkoph, tiers of terraced structures built of black onyx. The sun is no more than a not particularly bright star there, but the beings have no need of normal light, for their optical senses see mainly in the infra-red that radiates from the surface of their planet.

"The inhabitants are partly indigenous, partly alien, for the dominant species on Yukkoph arrived there even before the Earth had cooled. There were seven of them, off on a three-urgo faster-than-light excursion (an urgo is a measure of time, about a month and a half to us), when an interstellar storm crashed their ship, the _Minot, _on the dark surface of a planet that teemed with a form of life but had produced no discernible intelligence (Marginal note: The crash seems maddeningly reminiscent of something. And a planet with life but no intelligence? Much like certain sections of First Street in Washington, DC.)

"The ship proving unrepairable, despite their being aboard the _Minot_ a certain Surihvvru, a great teacher and a wise man. Uh, wise eldritch horror. At any rate, the survivors adapted, increased, built their cities, and today live their normal everyday lives (with the understanding that on Yukkoph a day lasts 332.20 years). Though a being from Earth would regard the creatures of Yukkoph with horror, they are not so different from us. Well, they're basically mobile, intelligent fungi, with thick, rugose skins, and coincidentally resemble ambulatory starfish using two of their five limbs as legs and feet, but they are not pink, do not live next to intelligent yellow kitchen sponges, and rarely if ever utter the word 'Duh.'

"They can speak and have a complex language. They call themselves the _Vwdu Shrsoh Qrw lq Dqb Zdb d Frsbuljkw Lqiulqjhphqw rq wkh Pljr. _They have a lot of time on their hands, and just saying 'Hello' can take up to an Earth day. For short, when they want to be short, they just call themselves the Shrsoh.

"The average ambient temperature on Yukkoph ranges between 40 and 45 degrees Centigrade. The world has no seasons as we know them. The Shrsoh become uncomfortable in temperatures much cooler than 25 degrees Centigrade and become immobile and dormant when the temperature drops to 10 degrees Centigrade. This does not bother them, since it never happens.

"However, they are aware of Earth and know that it has its own intelligent species, for a certain value of 'intelligence.' They have learned to intercept and to an extent decode our radio broadcasts but find little of interest there, except for a few fantastic shows. (Marginal note: TV too, now? What would they make of "Star Trek" or "The Twilight Zone?") They have measured the temperature of the Earth by remote sensors and have determined that its average temperature is about 14.5 degrees Centigrade, far too cold for their liking. They have therefore never bothered to try to visit us. Besides, they have a strong racial memory of that ill-fated three-urgo tour. They have never since re-developed space travel, let alone starships, and do not even like to travel on their planet very much.

"However, a few of their citizens have become _vrufhuhuv _(the term means something like 'magic handlers' or 'wise creatures' or 'goofballs') who secretively have explored dimensional travel (which can be used as a form of time or spatial travel) and, according to M. Amo Urde l'Artisanat, may even now walk among us."

(Marginal note: This at first looked like a promising work but seems to be mainly poppycock and balderdash. File and Forget.)

—From _Discoveries of Ancient Mysteries, As Reported by Seers and Mystics, _by Poppy Koch and Val Derdash (1930), quoted and annotated by Stanford Pines in his Journal 1.

* * *

As far back as the late 1970s, Stanford Pines had been aware of some entity that intermittently appeared in his upstairs closet. It could be heard moving restlessly now and then, and he strongly suspected it of trying on his suits. When he had first heard the furtive sounds, he had immediately suspected that some marsupial had got into the house and was denned up perhaps in the ceiling space above the closet, but experiments with a motion-capture camera had demonstrated that sometimes the suits hanging in his closet simply moved as if something had materialized there and was impatiently shoving them out of the way. In November of 1978, he had scribbled in the margins of his entry on the closet "Memo: It is not an opossum."

The annoying creature did not offer any obvious threat, and Stanford, at that time busily cataloguing the mysteries and anomalies of Gravity Falls, did not pay it much attention. He briefly considered that it might be a ghost, but he gave it all the standard ghost tests, and it flunked everything except "invisibility" rather humiliatingly.

Somewhat later, in early 1982, a few months before his mysterious disappearance, Stanford had hit upon a way to record the form of the creature in the closet with a special camera and filters, shooting through night goggles. That revealed a dim silhouette of a form, and in his Journal 3 he wrote the sighting up, noting that it held a wand in its right hand, wore a floor-length robe, and wore a pointy hat, proof, he declared, that the creature must be a human wizard who had made himself invisible.

He suspected it of having magically transformed his night goggles into a bat, but the truth was that he had absent-mindedly dropped the goggles onto his bed, they had fallen in the gap between bed and wall, and lay there for years until Dipper had discovered them in 2013, though by then their batteries had corroded and they no longer functioned. The bat that Ford believed had formerly been his goggles was fortuitous, a harmless specimen of _Eptesicus fuscus_, a breed that likes human structures as places for roosting. Stanford did not kill it or capture it and try to transform it back into night goggles (he would not have succeeded), but opened the window and let it escape into the night, where it ate a quantity of mosquitoes in gratitude.

Many years later, in Journal 6, Ford refined and corrected his impressions. Some of his conjectures had been that the apparition just might be Merlin, more than a thousand years old, and judging from the smell, nine hundred years overdue for a shower; perhaps he was time-traveling for unknown reasons; or the creature might be a remote descendant of humanity, perhaps a sub-surface dweller that had tangled with a time traveler and was imperfectly using the time machine to try to get back, back to the past; or—

Anyway, he didn't come close to the truth in these surmises. The creature was in fact a sorcerer, for a limited definition of that term (one who can manipulate the laws of nature by apparently supernatural means), but he was a member of the race that inhabits Yukkoph, the eerie planet that orbits midway through the Oort cloud on the far fringes of the sun's family.

The creature was in fact a Shrsoh _vrufhuhu, _though not a very talented one. In short, it was a wizard, but not a human.

It had spent close to forty years (equivalent in Earth terms to a few months) studying humans, or at least Stanford, Stanley, Dipper, and Mabel. It already knew English—well, about forty per cent of English, because the translations of Earth broadcasts were frankly hit or miss. It had practiced mimicking the sounds it heard while in the closet. The Shrsoh had naturally high-pitched voices (voice pitch was not a gender marker among them), and it liked Mabel's especially. Though it was not able fully to manifest and could not make them hear it, it often said, "Brobro!" and "irresistabullll" and other words it had caught, just practicing.

Once it had even taken enough pseudo-form so that when the lights were completely out—though it saw in the infra red and that didn't bother it—it had attracted a large, muscular Earth creature, a Grenda, into the closet and with the door closed had put some of the creature's mouth paint on its own mouth and had exchanged mouth-touchings with it, which seemed to please the Grenda greatly.

Very recently it had stumbled across ancient writings in its own language, the records of _vrufhuhuv _engraved on plates of gold in the era during which the first curious lungfish had wriggled its way out of Earth's primal scene onto a sunny, muddy shore, had looked around, and had mused, _Well, I must say I don't think much of this_ before going back into the water and waiting for a wetter day to try again.

Anyway, that particular group of vrufhuhuv had been arrested by the High Council (in those days the Shrsoh lived under a Councilocracy) and tried for being damned nuisances and at last had all been sentenced to life terms as _srru-edvwdugv_ (roughly "middle-school teachers." Their writings had been hidden away in a cave that the creature in the closet had discovered in his own basement. He didn't live in the good section of town.

And behold! One of those ancient wizards, if you want to call them that, had recorded a short treatise that might be titled "Upon the Physical Manifestation of a Corporeal Body such that its Wits, Faculties, and Bodily Strength and Form Remaineth Intact and it Doth Not Explode into a Pile of Stinky Slime, with at Least a Twenty Per Cent Chance of Success, Give or Take Fifteen Per Cent."

Well, they are long-winded.

But the creature in the closet was curious and interested in humans and wanted to achieve something significant and not end his days teaching snot-flapped middle schoolers the rudiments of spellcasting. This just might be his ticket out.

He was, frankly, frightened. There was a reversal of the spell that would allow him to return home from Earth. It also had a more-or-less twenty per cent chance of success. Pile slim odds on slim odds and you tend to get slime odds.

On the other hand, the old-timer who had succeeded in transporting himself from the midlands halfway around the globe of Yukkoph had pulled off the transportation without dying—though he had walked all the way back, which took him the equivalent of 22 Earth years and got him in serious trouble when his brood-mate screamed, "Where have you been all this time? There's work to do!"

And—this, the creature felt intuitively, was of great importance—the pioneer in dimensional travel had _not _had the advantage of a closet with magical properties into which to manifest. The closet's special construction made it an anchor point in space, time, and weirdness. It had taken the closet creature a long, long time (by Earth standards) to discover his planet's nearest equivalent. However, now he had lined a closet in his own apartment with thin slices of_ xqrewdqlxp_ (a submetallic ore; this is a scientific name, not easy to translate, but something like "nonsensium"). It had resonant properties and was nearly as clear a steady beacon as Stanford's closet.

The two anchor points, the creature felt certain, were possibly the key to increasing, perhaps even doubling, its chances for success.

At any rate, it had recently received a notice from the Board (the Shrsoh had over the centuries, through a series of political coups and rebellions, advanced from being a Councilocracy to a Boardocracy, the main difference being that the Council members served for life and inherited their positions from their parents, while the Board members were freely elected, though only Board members had the vote) that he needed to produce some scientific results and be pretty darn skippy about it if he didn't want to be assigned to next vilhurg's term as a beginning sixth-vilhurg teacher at St. Sljerlov's School of Messing About with Natural Laws.

The closet creature stepped into its own closet way, way off on the planet Yukkoph. It took a deep breath. The next instant could mean the difference between remaining a wizard, being his own boss, and indulging his curiosity or being the teacher of a motley gang of Shrsoh kids at that irritating edge where, when asked a simple question, a kid was apt to respond, "Please, sir, I can't think because Glyphtroph just farted."

And Glyphtroph would turn round in his seat and clout Mrfglumph about the earlugs, and you'd lose control of the class and—

Of course, the chances of failure in transporting from Yukkoph to Earth were intimidating. It could, in bald terms of probability, mean death.

But the alternative—

"Worth it," said the wizard, stepping into his own closet and pronouncing the critical spell.


	6. Chapter 6

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 5, 2017)**

* * *

**6\. Meeting P'q'xo Zefia**

After a period of intense disorientation and a sensation of first being turned inside-out and then right side-out again through exactly the same orifice (don't ask), P'q'xo Zefia—that was the closet wizard's short-form name—steadied himself and for the first time felt that the Earth closet in which he stood was really real, as opposed to a half-materialized dream, or to the office after a long weekend stuffed with three separate wild parties.

_Initial impressions: Cold! Atmosphere high in nitrogen! Makes my brain feel light!_

Yukkoph had an oxygen atmosphere, too, but with different components. The oxygen content there was about fifteen per cent, carbon dioxide about fifty per cent, methane close to thirty per cent, and the other five per cent mainly nitrogen. Owing to the fungoid base of his cell structure, P'q'xo metabolized nitrogen, and getting a jolt of it was a little like an Earthling taking a hit of Smile Dip. His body also needed oxygen, and the somewhat increased percentage he was breathing (though not at as high a gas pressure as at home) raced his metabolism a little.

Because the surroundings were cool—thanks to the air-conditioning system Soos had installed—things appeared dim and faint to him. He was familiar with he door but had a little bit of trouble with the handle. His arm-points ended not in fingers but in spongy pads with suckers. He rattled the knob but couldn't quite seem to get a grip.

Suddenly someone yanked the door open, and before him P'q'xo glimpsed two glowing figures—their body temperatures were in the high thirties, and that made them a bright orange against the background, though the clothing they wore somewhat dulled the glow. One of them brandished a weapon, the other a camera.

P'q'xo had prepared a formal and diplomatic speech of greeting for his first encounter with the English-speaking Earth creatures, but his vision of the tall, obviously strong creature with the blade-on-a stick rattled him, and he squeaked, "Hurt me not, pain to me is not a pleasantry hello I come in peace!"

"Are you the Invisible Wizard?" asked the creature with the camera. This was really the first time P'q'xo had seen the creatures in anything like clear detail, and he could not recognize them from appearance, but the voices were familiar.

"Deeper! Shoo be Deeper, and thass be—Mabbel?"

"Guess again," the other one said, not lowering her axe. "And don't make any funny moves, or you'll come in pieces!"

"Venaday!" piped P'q'xo delightedly. "You Venaday! Deeper sometime talk in odd way bout Venaday! Hey veel all a ways be live in vairy dales, no?"

Dipper recognized the first line of the first song he had ever composed, one dedicated to Wendy and one that he still strummed and sang when he was missing her keenly. "It's a song," he said.

"I do not this, what say you, z'pkbrtle, unit of speech meaning—"

"Word?" asked Wendy.

"Yes vord, I do not this vord zong know, sorry, sorry, stranger here. I come in peace."

"Well—come on out," Dipper said.

Seen in normal conditions, and clearly, the Closet Wizard was peculiar. As earlier noted, and as now noted by Dipper—well, let him put it in his own words, from the entry in his Journal he made later:

* * *

_The creature we saw looked like a starfish, standing on two of its points and using two others as arms and hands, but they didn't have fingers but instead grasping pads like those on the ends of a squid's tentacles, though with a flap that served as an opposable thumb. The top point was the head, with two startling blue eyes—no pupils at all, and perfectly round. Its mouth was a sort of V-shaped flexible beak. I think the two little flappy things at the very point of the head were its nostrils. The flaps moved as it breathed, anyway. Its ears were like a frog's—tympanic membranes, slightly angled forward. Its skin was medium gray and very bubbly looking._

_OK, it wore clothes. Not a space suit or anything like that. On top it was a cowled robe, only he wore the cowl thrown back, and on the bottom it was baggy pants like pajamas. No shoes. The clothes were an odd purply-green color._

_The lack of a normal nose and eyebrows, and the two little round blue marbles of eyes, made its expression impossible to judge. It had a high voice—it reminded me of Mabel in a state of excitement, in fact—and though it modulated the words as though trying to add emphasis and meaning, it really was just kind of a fluty irregular up-and-down pitching of the sound rather than an Earthly cadence._

_I must be getting jaded. It didn't scare me a bit. My first thought was—_

* * *

"Wendy," Dipper said, "Call Grunkle Ford. Tell him the Wizard has manifested. And tell him definitely not to call in the GIB."

"What this is, this j-kib?" P'q'xo asked.

"Guys in Black," Dipper said. "They investigate anomalies. They'd probably put you in a cage."

"Oh, cage me not!" P'q'xo said. "I come in peace! I am what you say student of the natural science of the many worlds and a stranger here and also I be freezing my how say you, _suhwwb-judb-exww_! Could warmer Deeper make?"

"What's a shub-jub-echwa?" Wendy asked.

"It is like the part of you Deeper so often pat-pat-pat."

"What?" Dipper asked, outraged.

"My butt, dude," Wendy said. "I've told you before, people do notice! Oh, hi, Dr. P—huh? Notice my butt, that's what. Don't get so flustered, everybody's got one. Listen, there's someone here you want to meet."

* * *

The temperature that day had hit 98, and by dint of throwing a blanket over P'q'xo (they didn't want to upset Abuelita or the Ramirez kids), Dipper and Wendy gingerly maneuvered P'q'xo down the stairs. "What call you this notch-ed ramp?" he asked eagerly.

"Stairs," Wendy said. "Hang on to the rails, man! OK, do it like a toddler, one foot on the next one, other foot on the same one, then repeat. Don't fall!"

"Oh, I not hurt, gravity here make me light as a _iduwexeeoh."_

Out in the yard, Tripper came over and sniffed around, wrinkling his nose. P'q'xo did have a pronounced odor, like a dank dirt-floored cellar with things sprouting from the soil. But Tripper shrugged in his doggy way and wagged his tail.

"What this form?" asked P'q'xo.

"This is a dog," Dipper said. "His name is Tripper."

"Oh, dock! That is like young vun, jess? You and Venaday have what you say babby? Hello babby Treeper!"

"He's not our kid," Wendy said, "and he's not even our species. He's a pet. An animal. An animal friend. Feel warmer now?"

"Jess! Must be close to your body temperature. Sky so white! These furry tall things—treese?"

"Yeah, trees, lot of redwoods, pines, some oaks—bonfire clearing, Dip?"

"That ought to be in full sun. And we could start a fire if that would help."

"Please vot is vire?"

"Fire," Dipper said distinctly.

"Fie-err."

"It's combustion. Rapid oxidation of organic material. It produces warmth."

"Do these com-push-tons, please. Is much more hot on my home world."

While Dipper kindled a campfire, Wendy called Ford and told him where to meet them.

It took him about a half hour—he had been over at his Institute, where the staff was revving up for the school year. By that time the campfire was going well, and a grateful P'q'xo was basking in its glow. "We have this too," he said, "but rarely use, because it never get as cold as this world. Odd. You say your warm from sun comes?"

"Right," Dipper said.

"We so far it just a little point of shine. Hard to see, not much heat come from it. Here it so bright! But I think our world makes better hots. Come from ground up, you know?"

When Stanford came hurrying back, he stopped in his tracks on the Mystery Trail, his eyes wide. "My word!" he said. "So you are the Invisible Wizard who's been haunting my closet!"

"I know voice!" P'q'xo shrilled. "You Stanvort Bines!" He cleared his throat and stood straighter. "Greetings honored Stanvort Bines of the planet they which on it live call Ear-ruth! I come in peace! I am the_ vrufhuhu_ P'q'xo Zefia from the planet Yukkoph, far away, and a member of the people called the _Vwdu Shrsoh Qrw lq Dqb Zdb d Frsbuljkw Lqiulqjhphqw rq wkh Pljr_. To you, fellow studier of things extraordinary and like yikes, I bring greetings, also I come in peace. Hello!"

"I think I understood some of that," Stanford said. "You're a student of natural phenomena, you come from the planet Yukkoph on the very fringe of the solar system, and this is a peaceful visit of scientific interest?"

"Yes! I like you, you smart. Vere is Mabbel? She is vierd and irresistabulll! I vish her to greet also!"

"She's away for a while," Dipper said. "She'll be back tomorrow—uh, you know our measurements of time?"

Brightly, P'q'xo said, "We'll be right back after these messages!"

* * *

Like Frosty the Snowman, another eldritch horror—what? Sure, he was! A creature composed entirely of snow, coal, one button, and a corncob pipe who lived only as long as a hat perched on his frigid dome and who was doomed when the temperature rose above thirty-two degrees Fahrenheit? What else would you have called him?

And think about this—what if poor old Uncle Ebbins had passed away peacefully in his front-porch rocking chair and his niece and nephew found him there and because his hair was all wind-tangled they wanted to make him look better before the EMT's arrived and they had happened on that same hat and placed it on the corpse's head? Huh? Thumpety thump-thump indeed!

OK, sorry, where were we? Oh, yes, like Frosty, P'q'xo could spend only a limited time on Earth. The temperature disagreed with him, for one thing. For another, Ford asked him if he had protected himself against Earthly pathogens.

That got them involved in a half-hour session of traded explanations. No, P'q'xo was not protected. What on Earth, he asked, could harm him?

Well, Earthly mushrooms were subject to bacterial, fungoid, and parasitical diseases. However, now that Ford thought of it, there was one environment that would provide heat and a practically sterile environment. A few minutes on the phone with Fiddleford set things in motion, and not long after that, P'q'xo enjoyed his first ride in an automobile. He was again bundled in the blanket, and with his cowl pulled up, he could be mistaken for an obese fellow about five-eight with a very jowly face, if you didn't look too closely.

Nobody did. The campus was deserted—except Fiddleford had come in—and Ford soon got P'q'xo into the gymnasium, which boasted a steam room.

Which had never been used by a single student.

The kind of student attracted to the Institute of Anomalous Sciences was typically thin, weedy, and vaguely asthmatic, or else tubby, bespectacled, and acned. Few of them were fond of sports or physical exercise, and they avoided the gym the same way girls avoided them. Anyway for the first time since it had been completed a year earlier, the steam room was turned on, the temperature increased to 114 degrees Fahrenheit—46 degrees Celsius, close enough—which put P'q'xo in his comfort zone.

Unfortunately, Ford could tolerate it for only fifteen minutes, but Fiddleford provided two-way communication tech that was heat-proof. Ford had video and audio; P'q'xo had audio only, since he perceived TV screens as flat and black. He saw heat, not light, remember. But Fiddleford was already working on assembling a viewscreen using HEDs (heat-emitting diodes) and said it would be ready in an hour.

Together P'q'xo and Ford calculated that the alien visitor could remain safely on Earth for only forty-eight hours (actually, double that, but Ford erred on the side of caution). When they returned him to the Shack, Fiddleford would decontaminate P'q'xo of Earthly pathogens with a ray emitter.

He would allow P'q'xo to take the calorvision screen back to his home, with schematics of a heat-sensitive camera—that should be a scientific advance that would free the alien wizard from the fear of becoming a middle-school teacher—and the two species could, through P'q'xo and Ford, maintain a clandestine contact to the benefit (they hoped) of both species.

Dipper, Wendy, and Ford were relieved that the encounter looked to be harmless. P'q'xo was pleased.

One condition remained. Before returning home, P'q'xo absolutely insisted on meeting Mabel.

Well, she would be back on Monday afternoon. They could have some time together.

"What could it hurt?" Wendy asked Dipper.

Dipper—just looked at her.

Wendy sighed. "Yeah," she said, "I know, dude. Trust me, I know."

But as Throg once said, "Without risk, there is no success."

Throg was the caveman who almost, but not quite, invented fire. He did, however, manage to demonstrate conclusively that lightning was fatal.


	7. Chapter 7

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 6, 2017)**

* * *

**7: Coming Home**

That clear, bright Sunday morning, Mrs. O'Grady was happy to meet Mabel at the airport—the day before, Teek had sounded her out about catching a ride back to Gravity Falls with his steady girl, and Mrs. O'Grady said she thought that was sweet and very nice of Mabel.

However, she did not tell Teek what a relief it was. She'd had two nights at dinner and then back at the hotel with an animated and excited Teek, and then a six-hour flight from Atlanta to Portland.

She had heard every detail about every moment of Teek's college orientation visit. Nine times. And while she dearly loved her son, she did not know for sure that she could endure the two-and-a-half-hour drive to Gravity Falls without stopping somewhere in a wooded area along the way, opening his door, and saying, "Go! Be free!"

The flight had left the ground in Atlanta at 7:04 that morning and had landed in Portland at 10:35. Those, of course, were local times, not head times. Head times made it a longer flight than it appears. The teens accompanied Mrs. O'Grady to her car, helping her with the bags (she was taking Teek's luggage straight home so he wouldn't have to worry about it). Mabel promised they'd call her when they got safely to Gravity Falls, and then Mrs. O'Grady left and Mabel and Teek went to short-term parking to pick up Helen Wheels, Mabel's fluorescent green Carino.

They spent a few minutes sitting in the front seat and kissing, but then Mabel said, "Enough of that for now! We'll save up for later. Had breakfast?"

"Uh, yeah," Teek said. He was wearing his glasses—he'd switched to contacts a few years before, and the spectacles gave him a sort of rumpled-haired Harry Potterish look—from one of the last couple of movies, though. He was no longer a young teen. "Mom and I ate in the Atlanta airport. I could eat lunch, though."

"Already?" Mabel asked. "My kinda guy!"

"Well, it's a long flight. It's eleven by Oregon time, but my stomach's telling me it's two in the afternoon."

"One brunchy lunch coming up!" Mabel said.

They left the airport, Teek cruised the web on his phone and found the name of a nearby restaurant that did all-day breakfasts, brunches, and lunch, and said, "This place has a four-and-a-half-star rating, and it's just a couple miles away."

"What is it?" Mabel asked.

"Uh—the Liddle Griddle. Liddle with d's. The mascot's a Chihuahua holding a spatula in his mouth—"

"That's it!" Mabel said. "Punch it in and get me directions!"

It was just a short haul, as Teek said, to the little restaurant on 42nd Avenue. They hit it at a good time—the breakfast crowd had thinned, it was a tad early for lunch, and the after-church bunch wouldn't arrive for another hour or so. They got a small booth and Teek ordered a barbecued pork sandwich—Mabel didn't mind, because she hadn't been a friend of that particular unknown pig—with tangy slaw and onion rings. She went with brunch, a cheese and veggie omelet with wheat toast and a fruit-and-nut salad.

"Why are you wearing your glasses?" she asked while they waited for their food.

"Allergies," Teek said, making a face. "Still lots of pollen down south of Atlanta. I had to switch the first evening. I'll change back after my eyes rest a little. See?" He opened his eyes wide, and Mabel saw the red veins in his sclera.

"Poor baby!" Mabel said. "Does it hurt?"

"Just a little itchy. But I went through half a bottle of eyedrops. I guess I'll get used to it. The glasses bother you?"

"Nope! They make you look all intellectual and distinguished. Hey, here comes the waitress!"

They got their food, plus a generous cup of coffee for Mabel and a glass of water with lemon for Teek, and dug in.

"So spill," Mabel said through a mouthful of egg and cheese. "How was the trip?"

"It's gonna be a lot hotter than Oregon," Teek said, grinning as he watched the appreciative way Mabel ate. "It's not the temperature so much, but it's really muggy. Like a sauna. I'm gonna like it, though." He took a bite of his sandwich and then added, "The school's in a nice quiet place, off a major highway, but it's got lots of property around it. It used to be a small mall, but it went bankrupt, the film school bought the property, bulldozed everything, and built a great little campus from the ground up. It's about two miles from the highway with lots of woods around it, not big trees, young pines mostly, but long-leaf. It's got four dorms, and I'll be staying in Hayes Dorm—I saw the room I'll share with another student, it's on the first floor and it's about as big as the attic room at the Shack and surprisingly cheap, compared to what your college was gonna charge you—"

Mabel didn't get another word in until they were on the road to Gravity Falls. She'd heard about the film-production facilities, the computer labs, the art and design building, the academic classroom building, the library and media center, yada yada yada. But nothing about her greatest concern, so she asked casually, "So how about the girls? They nice?"

"They were OK," Teek said with a shrug, taking a final sip of his water. "It's a little creepy, but you have to get used to everybody there being aggressively nice."

Mabel did a double-take. "Huh?"

"Well—OK, like this: a bunch of us went to an off-campus burger place, not fast food, more casual dining, you know, table service and all—the burgers weren't great, by the way. But anyway, this cheery waitress comes over and there are four of us, two guys and two girls, and she says, 'What can I get for y'all?' I can't really do the accent, but she just about _sang_ it. It sounded like she was making fun of us, I thought."

"Was she?"

Teek shook his head. "Apparently not. I asked if they had Pitt Cola, and she said, 'Oh, I'm sorry, Sugar, we don't. Would a Coke do?' And I said sure, and she got me my order, burger and fries and cola, and then she brought me a slice of pecan pie. 'Here you go, Sugar,' she said. 'This is on the house, to apologize for not havin' your cola.' Have you ever had pecan pie? I think you'd like it."

"Pie doesn't concern me! Don't go back there," Mabel said grimly. "Promise me you won't go back!"

"She _wasn't _coming on to me," Teek said. "She's that way with everybody. It's just—the South, I guess. But I won't go back to that restaurant anyhow, because the burgers were dry."

"Yeah, stay away from those dry burgers," Mabel warned.

On the drive back toward the Falls, as Mrs. O'Grady had already done, Mabel got an earful of how cool it was going to be to study at the Georgia College of Arts and Film.

The classes were small, the facilities were state of the art, the teachers he had met were interesting and involved, and from time to time the college hosted visiting lecturers, people famous in the film world who would come in to offer an evening's presentation or even better, a week or two weeks of master classes or workshops.

Who? Mabel asked.

Lots of different people, Teek said. He reeled off six names of people who had been there last year, not a one of whom Mabel recognized. He apologized and went through them again, offering identifications: The guy who had been lead physical-effects designer for the Revengers movie, _Battle of Endtimes; _a French actress who had won international awards for her acting—Mabel hadn't seen any of the films in which she'd starred, but relaxed when Teek guessed her age at sixty; a woman who was in high demand as a makeup designer for glamorous stars; the director of a rollicking series of teen romantic comedies whom she did remember once Teek mentioned the films; a screenplay writer who had done the script for _Doomtime, _a haunted-house movie that Dipper had liked better than she had, and so on.

"He's coming back in the fall," Teek said about the screenwriter. "They're filming _Doomtime II _in a studio in Union City—that's about ten miles away from the college—and he's coming over to do a three-week mini-course on the basics of screenwriting, eighteen hours in all. I've worked my schedule around those nine evenings and put my name down on the list for his class, but I probably won't get a seat. I know it'll be popular."

Mabel wished him good luck on getting in, he went on talking, she smiled and nodded and when she could, put in a comment or asked a question. And she got surprisingly mad.

Not at Teek. At herself.

_He's so happy! And it means so much for him, and I really am happy for him, too, but—_

_But I'm gonna miss him so much._

_And—darn it, I want him to miss me, too. Not get so excited and wrapped up that he forgets how much he means to me. I don't want him to forget me._

_Is that just old Mabel being selfish?_

_Am I a bad person?_

Though she really did listen to Teek, and she really did pay attention to her driving, and though it was so nice having him back—

All the way home she was wrestling with that nagging, horrible question.


	8. Chapter 8

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 6, 2017)**

* * *

**8: Video and Terrorvision**

Wendy and Dipper worked Sunday morning to edit together the "Understanding Mabel" video. They finished with a project that ran seven minutes and forty-nine seconds, and Dipper was satisfied—not elated, understand, but satisfied with it. He was rarely truly happy with anything he'd accomplished—Mabel complained that after he'd won a first-place medal in track, he'd gone over the whole race, filling his analysis with "Here's what I should've done."

And once after an unlucky turn of events in an investigation—though it ended well, after all—Ford had kindly reassured him, "Nobody's perfect, Mason. Your best is all anyone can ask for."

Yeah, he knew. But—Mabel was Mabel, and Dipper was Dipper. So he tended to want to fiddle with the edit even after Wendy thought it looked great. "I think I could tighten that by a second and a half and make the transition smoother," he said.

She punched his shoulder. "Come on, dude! This isn't Hollywood. This is fine. This will thrill Mabel. And you have to admit, it's a cut above the old ones we watched to get material."

"The camera work's better than it used to be," he agreed. "And you're right, I can really tell a difference between the new stuff and the old clips—the tripod keeps the picture steadier, and the focus and resolution's improved. Colors are better, too. I just hope she'll like it. Thanks for the sound work!"

Wendy had helped put together the soundtrack—just a couple of songs that Mabel liked, really, running in the background, one of them a karaoke instrumental of an Ampersandra dance tune, "Dance When You Gotta," and the other song Dipper's own guitar version of "Don't You Forget to Remember Those Times." She said, "No sweat, glad to do it. I think she'll like this, Dip. Lots of cute stuff, lots of funny stuff, and when you didn't have clips, you improvised."

That was true. For example, there was no footage of Aoshima, the flying dolphinic, quad-armed, rainbow-radiating, uh, thing that Mabel had seen in a Smile Dip hallucination, but she'd painted a portrait of him, it, whatever, and Dipper had put in a still photo of the acrylic painting.

Similarly, while engaged in a fight with unicorns, Mabel, Wendy, Grenda, and Candy had been far too preoccupied with fists and hooves flying to take out a phone and do a photo or video ("Too bad Tambry wasn't along," Wendy commented), but since then Mabel had taken a photo or two of the still-arrogant Celestabellebethabelle, the judgmental hoof-bag as Wendy had once called her. Wendy often said she was an ungrateful nag, because Stan had sheltered her and a couple other unicorns during Weirdmageddon, but Celestabellebethabelle never became friendly, though she would murmur greetings if Mabel ever happened to see her.

"I think she's probably still scared of Mabel," Dipper said. "I know when you guys got back with the hair, Mabel had a lot of unicorn, um, tears smeared on her. Look at these pictures—she doesn't appear friendly, but she always strikes a pose!"

"Yeah, she's used to getting her pictures airbrushed on the sides of vans," Wendy said, looking at the half-dozen shots Mabel had made of the unicorn over the years.

They used one of those, and, with Wendy giving him directions, Dipper had digitally altered the photo to show the unicorn with disheveled mane—lacking a couple of good-sized chunks—a black eye, and a bloodied nose. Under it he had put the caption "Don't Mess with Mabel!"

The video ended with a quick half-minute montage of about fifteen images—Mabel cuddling Little Soos right after returning with him from the adventure she and Teek had gone through in the maze dimension, Mabel and Pacifica boogieing down joyfully at one of the Woodsticks they had attended, Mabel's splendid portrait of her beloved art teacher, Mrs. Pepper, Mabel and Teek kissing under the mistletoe at Christmas, Mabel and Candy dolled up and looking gorgeous as bridesmaids for Grenda—lots and lots of high points.

The very end was an animation—a star trailed across the screen, leaving a rainbow arc behind it, and the credits began, "Mabel, we love you!" And then came a long, slow crawl, the words vanishing beneath the rainbow arc.

Dipper and Wendy, Grunkles Stan and Ford and their wives, Soos and Melody and Abuelita, Pacifica and Candy and Grenda, everyone, had either signed their names or else Dipper had copied the signatures from letters Mabel had saved in her scrapbook. Even Waddles and Widdles's hoof-prints were there, next to their portraits, and Dipper carefully added a paw-stamp from Tripper. His photo was his favorite Noble Dog profile pose, chin high, ears up, pointed, and proud.

"Too much?" Dipper asked about the credits.

"Mm, schmaltzy," Wendy said, chuckling.

Dipper smiled at her. "Remember that little note you gave me the first time we left Gravity Falls? You told me to open it the next time I missed the town. I opened it as the bus drove out of the Valley! And it kept me going until we got to come back. Trust me, this will mean a lot to Mabel, even if it's schmaltzy."

"Hey, I didn't mean it critically. Schmaltzy's good!" Wendy said. "Don't knock the schmaltz, man."

She was right. All in all, the seven-odd minutes captured memories that ought to cheer Mabel up when she went into a slump. They finished by lunch time, and they planned to debut the video that evening at the welcome-home celebration for Teek.

* * *

Working with his usual incredible speed, Fiddleford had managed to convert visual signals from whatever source—life, films, video, even photos—into heat signatures. "Real-time ain't no five-bar gate to climb over. Just read the heat signatures direct and convert 'em. But adaptin' from photographs, well, I reckon the heat-colors might be squirrelier than a walnut tree in September. Anyways, the picture'll be clear. I kinda worked it so the warm colors, you know, the red-orange-yellow spectrum, would be hotter, the cooler ones, the blues and soft greens and grays and all, would be in degrees of coolness, black would be real dark, and whites would be kind of a neutral in between the cools and the warms. If you get my meainin'."

They did some experimental short videos and photos, processed them through, and took them to P'q'xo Zefia, who was still happily ensconced in the steam room (Ford had put a huge "CLOSED DURING RENOVATION" sign on each gym door to keep any curious passers-by away, though with staff and students off on vacation, except for two custodians, who stayed out when they were told to lest they find work to be done, no one was on campus).

"Are you comfortable?" Ford asked through the speaker system they had set up. The temperature inside the steam room had pegged at 115 Fahrenheit.

"Comfortable yes am I," P'q'xo said. "Composing field notes to let my people know of the wonders finding here am I!" He seemed to be using a stylus on some gold metallic paper or cardboard, which fortunately seemed heat and moisture-proof.

"I keep Journals myself," Ford said. "Here, look at the viewscreen we gave you. We're going to try a few experiments. Fiddleford, the first five-second clip, please. Can you make out anything on the screen?"

To Ford, looking through the thick viewing window into the steam room, the screen flickered but produced no discernible image. Fiddleford had seen to it that the screen radiated at 125 Fahrenheit up to about 175, since its operating environment would be about as warm as the steam room.

"Yes! Yes!" P'q'xo said. "A rolling vehicle I see! With rolling wheels! And a person carried inside!"

"Yep, that there's a picture of what we call a carmobile—" Fiddleford began.

"'Car' for short," Ford kindly interjected.

"Yeah, a car. It's how most of us humans get around. Try this one. Do you know who this is?"

"Deeper and Mabbel!" exclaimed P'q'xo. "Yes, very clear, nearly like in real life!"

It was a scanned image of a framed photo Ford kept on his desk—the twins on their fifteenth birthday, heads together and grinning at the camera.

They tried a few more, and though P'q'xo did not always recognize the objects—there were no towering trees on Yukkoph, so a redwood had no real meaning to him, except "Tall and pointy thing"—he could discern shapes and forms in the heat-signature images.

"Reckon it's a-workin'," Fiddleford said. "Lookie here, I'm gonna hook up the TV feed to that screen. Ford, take him the remotes."

Stepping quickly into the hellish atmosphere, and then quickly out again, already sweating profusely, Ford briefly explained that the first remote would allow P'q'xo to change channels—find images of different Earth activities—and the second remote would make the sound on the speakers accompany each new broadcast image.

P'q'xo already knew some of the programs, though only from sound. "I study!" he said. "My talk get improvement as the picture and the words I see and hear together!"

"The first setting is a nature documentary from a public tele—" Ford began.

This time Fiddleford did the favor: "That setting will show you things like the animals and the landscapes of the Earth," he said. "It ain't complete, understand, but you'll learn a right smart of stuff about how Earth critters behaves and where they lives."

"What this?" asked P'q'xo, staring at his screen.

Ford glanced at the TV monitor. "That's an animal we call a panda," he said. "An adult one is a little bigger than a human."

McGucket added, "Looks kinda-sorta like animals we have 'round here, called bears, but it's really more like a raccoon. You'll learn about raccoons and bears, too, Anyway, the pandas live on the far side of our world."

"Look little like animal we have what we say is _zdonlqj wzr froru edoo zl'wk q'r wdlo. _Um, means, _animal like two different color balls stuck together what walk on feet and have no tail_. About up to my middle."

"Do you need anything?" Ford asked.

"Hm? No, enjoying this imaging. What might need?"

"Food," Ford suggested. "Water."

"Oh. Water. Drink. Yes, would be good. But not just Earth water, need some adds."

It took about half an hour, but by describing basic atoms and molecules, Fiddleford got the formula about right: boiled Earth water (no pathogens), to which they added a cocktail of supplements, none in huge amounts: selenium, molybdenum, sodium chloride, and silicates. As for food, P'q'xo had eaten heavily before undertaking his expedition and could hold out for about an Earth week—and as though he sensed a social delicacy, he explained there would be nothing solid or liquid to worry about. "Volatize wastes," he said. "All gases, no liquids and solids."

Which very likely explained the strange, intense, funky odor that wafted from him. He was constantly, quietly excreting gases through the pores in his starfish-like exoskeleton. "Reckon his people has a pore sense of smell," Fiddleford said when he brought back a flask of the prepared water.

"Was that a pun?" Ford asked.

"What?" Fiddleford asked innocently, but he was grinning.

Again, Ford ducked in to give the liquid to P'q'xo, who thanked him and then extended what looked like a green tube from his mouth through the neck of the two-liter flask and down into the water. He sucked up about half of it. "Is good. Much like home," he said. "Excuse, I watch now the pen-goo-ins. Like little peoples. Is cold where they are?"

"Very cold," Ford said. "I don't think you could endure the temperature there."

"Good, they funny, maybe cold is to keep them safe."

Ford agreed. He didn't have the heart to tell the alien that if anyone was interested in any creature on the face of the Earth—

Well, no matter what environment it inhabited, that creature couldn't count on its own safety.

"I think," Ford told Fiddleford, "P'q'xo's people may be more humane than humans."

"He does seem right gentle," Fiddleford agreed. "From what I can understand, they don't eat animals or even livin' plants. They assimilate food from humus and mineral-rich soil. Reckon he's gonna be OK fer another twenty or thirty hours of Earth time?"

"He says though he could push it to a week, he'll keep his stay to about forty-eight hours because he doesn't want to risk being hurt by our environment or contaminating it with anything he might have brought in from his. We'll have to take his word that he'll be all right. It's hard to judge the state of his health, not knowing much about his physiology. We'll keep an eye on him. He may be ready to return home once he meets Mabel. He seems to have taken a shine to her just from observing during his occasional visits to the closet."

"Anyhow, we can be grateful them shim-shammin' guys from the Ghost Harassers ain't around. What a headache that'd be!"

"Yes, that is a bit of luck," Ford agreed. "Well—while he's enjoying himself, let's arrange for some lunch. If you'll stay here and observe, I'll go buy us some take-out."

"Thai?" Fiddleford asked. His Tennessee palate had taken its own sweet time adjusting, but he had developed a taste for spicy Thai cuisine.

"Very well. I can drive up to Suitan Thai in Hirschville," Ford said. "I'll order ahead. It'll take thirty or forty minutes, and the food may be cold by the time I get back."

"That's no nevermind," Fiddleford said with a grin. "We can go in and visit with Mr. P'q'xo and have it pipin' hot again in no time. Let's see. Bring me some Gai Med Ma Moung and a couple of spring rolls, it ain't too much trouble."

"None at all," Ford said. "None at all."

* * *

Just when everything is going along all smooth and relatively normal, events tracking with wheels between the highway ditches for Gravity Falls, one might say, that's the time for something to happen.

No one would have believed in the last years of the second decade of the twenty-first century that this world was being watched casually and intermittently by intelligences comparable to ours. As people went about their daily concerns, performing mundane activities like repairing a toilet, cooking a birthday cake, or dodging traffic on Fifth Avenue in New York, or in Gravity Falls of arguing with a talking mouse over traffic easements across the kitchen floor to and from its hole, or settling a garbage bill with a Gnome to prevent a week's worth of kitchen offal from being dumped on one's porch, or flooring the accelerator as a swooping pterosaur paced the car, way out there far in the Kuiper belt the beings on the planet Yukkoph were beginning to focus on our relatively small blue planet.

This was really the fault of P'q'xo, though it was fault without blame. He had not mentioned it, because it did not seem important to him, so Ford and the other humans were unaware that, in terms of his own species, P'q'xo was not a mature adult, but somewhere along in the equivalent of a human's late-teen, early-twenties stage. His people matured very slowly, lived very slowly, and kept living for a long time.

Most of them never saw their first birthday, true. However, that was because at the distance their world was from the shrunken, weak sun, it took some 2679 Earth years for the planet to make one orbit. The average _Vwdu Shrsoh Qrw lq Dqb Zdb d Frsbuljkw Lqiulqjhphqw rq wkh Pljr _could confidently expect to reach an age of .75 of one Yukkophian year. That meant that one born in the year that Julius Caesar was assassinated would be entering the equivalent of a Yukkophian nursing home about the time of P'q'xo's jaunt to Earth. A few did make it to a full year or a little more, but only rarely.

Anyway, the point is that Yukkophian parents didn't tell their offspring all the facts of life in one go. The information trickled out over the course of many, many decades, as the young Shrsoh's abilities and understanding developed.

Now, one thing that P'q'xo had not been told was that at about the age of .50 to .55 year, some Shrsoh developed the ability to locate others mentally. It was not telepathy—no two-way communication—but by concentrating, one of the mentally gifted Shrsoh could locate another.

And one of the gifted ones, related to P'q'xo, had suddenly become alarmed, because a sudden awareness burst into her mind that young P'q'xo had traveled more than a hundred yevns from home, something he had never before done—that's about the distance from Central Park in Manhattan to the south shore of Umbagog Lake in Maine (about 400 miles).

The signal indicated that the young scamp had wandered much farther than that—about fourteen light-hours, in fact, or some 9,450,000,000 miles in Earth terms, or "a right fur piece" in Fiddleford's idiom.

The sensitive understood that physically P'q'xo was fine and surmised that he was on the planet the Shrsoh called "the talking ball," referring to the radio-wave signals they had been picking up for their equivalent of a few months or so.

And since the Shrsoh had abjured space travel for eons and had only vague rumors of it, more akin to mythology than history, the sensitive—well, call her by her right name, D'x'qw Eodee-huprx'w'k Exvbergb, or Rog Q'rv'b for short—immediately jumped, except one never jumped on Yukkoph because the heavy gravity made surviving a hop problematic, to the conclusion that—

_The aliens have somehow kidnapped P'q'xo!_

That meant war!

The drawback was that no one on Shrsoh had fought a war for millions of years. They didn't know how to properly begin.

The advantage was that they had been listening to, and partly deciphering, communications from Earth for many of our decades.

And if there's one thing Earth people are good at, it's killing other Earth creatures in massive numbers for little reason.

The Shrsoh could learn. Quickly.

Their first move, Auntie Rog decided, would be to raid P'q'xo's home. If the aliens had abducted him from there, the method of transportation might still be open.

The Shrsoh could conceivably use that means to travel to Earth and rescue their own.

And if they had to fight whatever creatures lurked way off there—

It was a matter of honor.

On Earth, too, honor was a good reason for mass slaughter. Even though ninety percent of the time it was only imaginary.

Things started to heat up.

* * *

To be continued.


	9. Chapter 9

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 6, 2017)**

* * *

**9: Countdown to Party!**

At three-thirty, Mabel dropped Teek off at his house and warned, "Take a nap. The party starts at seven! Be sure to show up on time, 'cause you're the Guest of Honor!"

Teek, sitting in the front seat with his arm around her shoulders, began, "You really don't have—"

Mabel grabbed his shirt and pulled him close. "Kiss me! Mwah! Show up! Seven! No back talk!"

"Yes, Mabel," Teek said sensibly. And after his early start and the long plane trip, he was visibly tired, after all. He got out of the car, yawned, waved, and walked to his house, where his Mom's car was already parked in the carport.

"Party decorations to do!" Mabel told herself, aloud, as she put Helen Wheels in gear and turned in the driveway to reverse out, head to the highway, and go back toward the Shack. "Allowing an hour for dinner, do I have enough time in three and a half hours to dress up the Shack? Of course you do! You're Mabel! Thanks, Mabel! Mabel, talking to yourself is a sign something's wrong with you. Something's wrong with both of us, Mabel! Ha-ha-ha-ha!"

Fifteen minutes later, she burst into the shack, lugging her overnight case in her left hand and with her right honking deafening blasts on an airhorn. "Form up! Emergency Party Time, people! Hup, hup, hup!"

"Got it covered," said Dipper, uncovering his ears. "Go check out the big parlor."

The Ramirezes were not at home just then, and Dipper and Wendy had been lazing on the sofa. Wendy put a little finger in the ear closest to the air horn and wriggled it. "What pig parlor?" she asked above the temporary tinnitus.

"Whaaat?" Mabel asked. "You guys! You didn't! Did you?"

Dipper and Wendy followed her down to the room where Grunkle Stan had thrown his legendary party (the one where even with the help of ten clones of himself, plus a paper-jammed horror, Dipper couldn't quite pull off asking Wendy to dance with him). The walls and ceiling hung with draped red, green, blue, white, and gold ribbons, the exposed beams dangled with grape-clusters of decorated balloons, and when Dipper clicked off the lights, the place even sparkled with the moving gleams of the old reliable revolving disco ball. They'd set up Soos's keyboard on a dais, and at the sight of all this, Mabel clapped her hands and hopped in place. "You guys! You're great! Wait a minute, you won't be selling tickets, will you?"

"Absolutely not," Wendy said. "This isn't a Stan party."

Mabel pointed an accusatory finger at her brother. "And no charging an exit fee!"

Dipper put his hand on his twin's shoulder. "Mabel! Relax. No fees involved at all. This is a party for you and Teek!"

Mabel had taken her phone out and flicked through RSVP texts. "Let's see—Candy's coming, and Adam, and Paz, and Thompson and Vanilla, and Toddy, Ulva, Gideon, Lisa, Ronnie, Delia—I just wish Grenda could come, but she and Marius—"

"Surprise, Sis, we fixed it. Soos is going to haul in the flat-screen TV," Dipper said. "I'll hook up the laptop to the TV. See, Wendy got in touch with Grenda, and she and Marius are going to drop in for a short Skype visit. You'll get to talk to them, and they can say their hellos to everybody."

"Gotta do it on the dot of nine, though," Wendy warned. "'Cause of the time difference, that'll be five tomorrow morning in Iceland, and Marius and Grenda have things they gotta do."

"Wait, what? Iceland?" Mabel asked, her eyebrows heading north like a couple of surprised migrating birds.

"It's part of their big six-week honeymoon trip," Dipper said. "They're going sniggling for eels in Iceland."

"Eel sniggling in Iceland!" Mabel squealed, her eyes enormous with delight. "Grenda's fondest dream!"

"Yeah, but Marius had to get a special permit," Wendy said. "Eels are endangered, so it's just sniggle and release."

"That's all she ever wanted to do," Mabel said, brushing away a tear. "I'm so happy for her! She's so lucky that Marius loves her that much. He's not an eel fan, I happen to know. But Grenda's all about the eels!"

"Uh, let's stop saying 'eels,'" Dipper said. "I'm with Marius. They make me feel creepy."

"Oh, and for later, Mabes, there's something else," Wendy said.

Dipper quickly overrode her: "But that can wait until tomorrow morning. Nothing to be alarmed about."

"Alarmed? That's alarming itself! What is it, Dipper?" Mabel demanded. "Wait a minute. You didn't raise the dead again, did you?"

"No! I've been very careful about that," Dipper said. "No, it's just, you know, a little Gravity Falls mystery. Nothing dangerous, and nothing that'll interrupt the—"

"Karaoke!" Mabel interrupted.

Dipper groaned. "I was hoping you wouldn't think of—"

"We gotta have a karaoke session! I'll run and get my setup. Let's see. We'll start off with a couple hours of dancing and karaoke and party games, and then we'll visit with Grenda—"

"Not too long," Dipper cautioned. "International rates."

"So—how long?" Mabel asked, sounding just a bit disappointed

"Fifteen minutes," Dipper said firmly.

Mabel thrust a fist high in the air. "Thirty!"

Dipper crossed his arms. "Fifteen."

Mabel struck her other palm with her fist, like a judge gaveling for order. "Thirty-five!"

Dipper shook his head. "Ten!"

"For—huh? You're going _down_? Wait, Dipper, that is not how this is supposed to work!"

"I'm not Grunkle Stan. Fifteen minutes, Mabel. That's plenty, actually."

Wendy nudged Mabel. "Hey, Mabes, fifteen is reasonable. It'll be great for Grenda to say hi to all her friends, but come on—party people will want to dance and chat and stuff, and Grenda and Marius will want to have their breakfast and then get out their sniggling gear and head for the rivers where the eels are running—"

"Eels," Dipper muttered, shivering. "Why did it have to be eels?"

"Oh, all right," Mabel said. Then she brightened. "Anyway, we can have snacks right after the chat, then lower the lights and do romantic slow dances after. That sounds perfect! Speaking of after, where's the after party gonna be?"

"We didn't_ plan_ an after party," Dipper said. "We thought we'd wrap things up around ten PM—"

"No after party? I gotta get to my room! There's after planning to do!" Mabel took off running.

Wendy called after her: "Eels!"

"Aw, man!" Dipper complained. "What was that for?"

"I kinda like to watch you squirm, man," Wendy said, grinning mischievously.

* * *

Off at the Institute, Fiddleford and Ford had eaten their lunch (Pad Thai for Ford) and had huddled over another of McGucket's improvised contrivances for a couple of hours. "I reckon this here might do it," Fiddleford said.

He had used an old fishing-tackle box as the case. Inside it he had jammed in an intricate array of printed-circuit boards, quantum transistomofiers, wack relays, logic analyzers, hyperflex parallel channelers, Bluetooth components, and even more esoteric McGucket labs modules. He'd drilled holes for two different control knobs and two different gauge displays, along with a 4.6 x 10.16-cm plasma-screen display. Plus along the lid of the tackle box ran a row of the old-fashioned tulip-blossom-shaped Christmas tree lights, in a sequence of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and octarine (the latter a color that bees and art students could see).

"What are the lights for?" Ford asked curiously.

"Jest fer purty," McGucket said. "I reckon there ain't no use in buildin' jest a plain ol' universal translator. It's best if you do it in style!"

"That makes sense," Ford said, knowing that to his old friend Christmas lights had to be completely logical. Somehow.

"Let's fire this baby up and see if we done did what I wanted us to done do!"

They left McGucket's lab on the second floor of the main building and carried the device to the gym. Ford unlocked it, held the door for McGucket, and then before closing the door again, he held the edge of the frame, narrowed his eyes, and peered around suspiciously.

But the custodians had been given the day off, the campus was officially closed, and the only one watching them was a squirrel in the parking lot. Ford closed and locked the door behind him.

OK, it's obvious everyone's expecting it. Did the squirrel scamper to a tree and pull out a miniature walkie-talkie and report to the rest of its clan that the humans were in the cage and it was time to spring the trap? Did a horde of fiendish furry varmints who had long been planning the overthrow of humanity rush to the scene? Were they armed?

No. This is outside the Valley. This is just an ordinary Western ground squirrel, more intelligent than a pigeon but not as smart as a second-generation iPhone. It was doing normal squirrel business, foraging for tidbits and now and then digging in the earth to see if it could find where in the hell it had buried that acorn the previous fall.

Even in the vicinity of Gravity Falls, sometimes a squirrel is just a squirrel. Not like Marvin, who lived in a tree fifty yards from the Mystery Shack and was deviously planning—

Wait, that's another story altogether.

Anyway, Ford and McGucket went to the steam room and by means of the intercom, Ford asked P'q'xo how he was.

"In body fine!" the alien replied. "Excited am I with this _khdw ylvlrq slfwxuh pdfklqh!_ Look, look, how is these creatures to make so quick so much things?"

Ford glanced at the outside monitor. "Um—you're watching an animated cartoon," he said. "Those two boys are brothers, and they invent something every day of the summer, while their sisters—"

"Please what manaminated Khartoum might be?"

"Hey, listen here," McGucket said. "I done whomped together a translator machine that might help us out on both sides. But I gotta calibrate it. When I give you the signal, would you kindly please count out loud from one to a hundred?"

"For why?"

"'Cause if this works, it'll make communicatin' a whole lot easier."

"Will try!"

Fiddleford activated his new device and told P'q'xo to begin.

The alien visitor started to count: "_Krjybo qexq fp pfkdib. Xklqebo krjybo ifhb fqpbic. X pfkdrixo krjybo x pfkdrixo krjybo x pfkdrixo krjybo. Pfkdrixo krjybo xka xdxfk xka xdxfk xka xdxfk. Mbocbzq krjybo_." That got him up to five.

After that, Fiddleford went through a list of 1000 basic English words and had P'q'xo come up with his own equivalents. They lucked out in that P'q'xo, thanks to having studied Earth broadcasts for so long, understood about 668 words perfectly, paraphrased rough synonyms with a couple hundred others, and blanked on only about ninety words. The machine whirred, buzzed, extrapolated, and then was ready to be set in the dual-translate mode.

"Here ya go, old friend," Fiddleford said, passing the microphone to Ford. "You deserve the honor of speaking the first universally translated words to our visitor here."

Ford gratefully took the mike. "Greetings to you, P'q'xo, on behalf of peaceful people of Earth. May our collaboration bring us both knowledge and mutual understanding."

The machine repeated his words, but in P'q'xo's language. More or less: _"Dobbqfkdp ql vlr, M'N'p, lk ybexic lc qeb mbxzbcri mblmib lc Bxoqe. Elmbcriiv tb yofkd qldbqebo zliixyloxqflk xka jrqrxi rkabopqxkafkd."_

And the alien understood those words as meaning, "Greetings to you, P'q'xo, on behalf of the Earth is getting peaceful beings. Hopefully we bring together friend working and us understanding each the other."

Garbled, sure, a bit—and yet miles beyond the rough-and-ready translations that the alien could work out in his own mind. He understood enough.

He babbled in his own tongue, and nearly simultaneously Fiddleford's magic talking box spoke to Ford and McGucket in English: "Wise friends from small blue planet, this happy makes me so! Now like wise thinkers and doers of the science can we discuss and make friendly debate and grow together more knowing of the rules of the universal operating system! I know what we are going to do today!"

"Yes," Ford said with a broad smile. "yes, you do."

Fiddleford twitched. "I feel right funny," he said. "Do y'all think there ought to be a platypus somewheres 'round here fer some reason, or is it jest me?"

* * *

To be continued.


	10. Chapter 10

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 6, 2017)**

* * *

**10: Invasion of the Mystery Shack**

Soos was pumped. He had always loved doing the DJ duties, and his expertise had grown over the years so that now he almost never hit the dog-bark sound-effect key when he'd intended to hit "da bomb" for the explosion.

And since he no longer relied on vinyl or even on CDs, but on a digital playlist, he had much more control over the ebb and flow of music. It was an unsuspected talent, and one that had put him in demand for at least half a dozen different dances over an average year, ranging from the Teen Center to the Veterans' Hall and calling for tunes that easily covered half a century, depending on the audience.

That Sunday evening, because of Mabel, Soos had included a hefty serving of songs from the 1970s and 1980s, but others went right up to the early summer of 2017. Something for everyone, in short. Consider: the festivities launched with Legend's "All of Me," cool for saying hi to close friends and a nice slow-dance beginning for the party. Soos followed that with a real fun oldie, "Twist and Shout," to get those feet moving and those arms waving, and then "Levels" to tell people "time to get your party on!"

From there, the playlist was an eclectic mix—fast, fun tunes for pumping the blood, sweet slower ones to let couples hug and sway, funny ones that often got them singing along or responding with cheerful yells (dare I say "Ghost . . . Busters!"), and together with the special lighting (Dipper and Wendy had put colored blue and red bulbs in the secondary lighting fixtures and had doused the white bulbs, so the parlor looked exotic and other-worldly) and the laughter and the refreshments and all, the mood was, like, electric, dawgs! And the keyboard went _Crrrrackle!_

Twenty minutes in, Dipper saw that Mabel's party was going to be a success. He took Wendy's hand, they did a spirited floss—a dance that Dipper had never even seen or heard of, but one that Wendy communicated to him with a quick mental flash—and a circle of admirers formed around them, clapped and yelled encouragement, picked up the moves, and in the end, Dipper and Wendy gracefully danced their way out of the crowd and out onto the quiet Museum porch—the gift-shop porch was crowded with kids taking a break already.

"That was fun!" Wendy said.

"Where the heck did you learn it?" Dipper asked.

"Internet, dude! First time I tried to dance it, though. Did you like it?"

"I always like dancing with you," Dipper told her. "But it's nice to come out and cool off after struggling not to look too clumsy."

"You did fine. Anyway, not much cool about it right now," Wendy said.

That much was true. At seven-thirty, the sun was still up, and the red line in the thermometer was still high, right up around 96. "I guess at least the visitor guy is comfortable," Dipper said. "I wonder what Great-Uncle Ford's learning from him?"

"Secrets of the universe, man!" Wendy said. "Is he down at Dr. P's house?"

"I think McGucket and Great-Uncle Ford took him to the Institute. I hope he doesn't get the idea that he's a prisoner or anything. It'd be just our luck to start an interplanetary incident."

"So what were you telling me about this unknown planet or whatever while we were decorating?" Wendy asked. "Up on the ladder, I kinda lost the thread."

"Yukkoph?" Dipper shrugged. "Well, it's supposed to be so far away from the outer planets that its presence is all but impossible to detect. You know how Pluto was discovered?"

"Mickey went to the dog pound?" Wendy asked. Then she giggled. "Sorry. Mabes isn't out here, just subbing for her. I know that astronomers detected, like, gravitational wobbles or something, right?"

Dipper nodded and—as Wendy thought to herself—began to sound very much like Stanford Pines as he slipped easily into lecture mode.

Even the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians knew of five planets, apart from the Earth, Dipper explained: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were plain to the naked eye. They didn't think of the Earth as a planet, because they supposed it was the center of the universe. Now, "planet" is from the Greek word "planetes" and that means "wandering." Because the background stars always looked to be in the same position with regard to each other—

"Like the Big Dipper always keeps that shape," Wendy put in slyly.

"Right, and all the other constellations. But against the background constellations, Mercury and Venus and Mars and the others moved from night to night, wandering across the heavens."

He went on: Our names for the planets come from Latin. The Romans named Mercury after their god of the forge, Venus after the goddess of love, Mars after the god of war, Jupiter after the king of the gods, and Saturn after the god of time, see. It's strange, but the next planet, Uranus, wasn't known to the ancient people at all.

"Why strange?" Wendy asked.

Dipper explained: "It's really dim, but it can be seen without a telescope. But nobody caught on that it was a planet until the 1700s, when the astronomer William Hershel saw it over a month or so and realized that it was slowly moving. Funny, but Hershel named it 'King George's Planet,' and only later did a German astronomer—I forget which one, but it might have been the Bode's Law guy—renamed it Uranus to keep it in line with the other planets."

Then about sixty or seventy years after that, astronomers realized that the orbit of Uranus was wonky. Something was making Uranus wobble a little, and that had to be the gravity of a planet-sized body. So they searched the area of sky where they thought the planet might be, and they discovered the seventh planet, which they named Neptune, for the god of the sea.

Neptune's like Uranus—people with exceptionally sharp eyesight can barely see it, and it's visible with even a small telescope. In fact, Galileo once saw it while he was observing Jupiter, but he mistook it for a star.

Anyway, in the twentieth century, astronomers detected some anomalies in the orbit of Neptune, or thought they did, so they started looking for the next planet. This time an American, Clyde Tombaugh, discovered it around the year 1930. He named it after the Roman god of the Underworld—

"But it's not a real planet, right?" Wendy asked.

"Well—it's a dwarf planet. It's not even as big as the moon—our moon, I mean," Dipper said. "Pluto has a moon of its own, Charon, which is about half the size of Pluto itself. Anyway, it would have to be massive enough to clear all the small asteroids and rocks and junk from its region to be a regular planet, and it's not that massive. Yukkoph would have to be big enough to support life, making it a genuine planet, and from what, uh, Piquickso says, it's more massive than Earth, but so far out the gravity doesn't do much to affect Pluto and Neptune and all."

He spoke briefly about H.P. Lovecraft and his imaginary planet, "dread Yuggoth," ruled over by the crustacean like Mi-Go.

"Pretty close to Yukkoph," Wendy said. "Coincidence?"

Dipper shrugged. "Who knows? Lovecraft read everything from scientific reports to books supposedly channeled by trance mediums. Lucky guess or maybe one of the books had kind of a half truth or two in it."

Wendy half-turned her head toward the Shack. "Listen. Sounds like they're into the karaoke."

Dipper listened. The strains of "Love Me, Show Me," an eighties song originally by the girl group Cover Up, were coming out loud and clear. "That's Paz, Mabel, and Candy," Dipper said. "They sound good together, don't they?"

"Mm, yeah, little bit better than Love Patrol Alpha," Wendy murmured.

"Hey, I never ever agreed to that name!"

Wendy grinned. "It's cool, Dip. I didn't hear the original performance, but I don't think my head would've 'sploded if I had."

"You've heard us since then," Dipper said. "I apologize for that. Let's stay out here for a while. If we go in now, Mabel's gonna drag us up to the microphone."

"OK, but we need to get back in before long. We're kinda the chaperones. Soos doesn't count."

"Let's just wait a while longer," Dipper said. "Listen—Mabel's got Teek up with her now."

Poor Teek was willing, but he had a hard time staying on key with "Pretty Nearly Paradise," though Mabel's enthusiasm almost—almost—covered up for his nervous delivery.

"My sister loves those eighties songs," Dipper said.

"Whereas you prefer Babba," Wendy teased.

"I have no shame in admitting that a top-forty song is catchy," Dipper said with dignity.

"Yeah, one or two of their songs are OK," Wendy agreed. "I never liked 'Austerlitz' or 'Hernando,' but 'Disco Girl's' tolerable, and 'Holy Moley' is kinda fun to sing."

Dipper picked up the cue and began to sing in his soft baritone:

* * *

You started cheatin' on me the day we met,

I'm pushing you off my list with no safety net—

* * *

Wendy joined in, leaning her head against his, and inevitably, when they did return to the parlor, Mabel grabbed them and announced, "Now we're gonna get a song from that great duet team, the Engagements! What're you guys gonna sing, Wendy?"

"Guess there's no escape from Babba!" Wendy yelled over the laughter and applause.

"Not 'Disco Girl!'"

"Holey Moley!" Dipper yelled.

"Wait, wait, it's on the machine—wait—got it! Everybody, give it up for the Engagements and their cover of the Babba classic 'Holey Moley!' Take the mike and go, go, go!'

With everyone laughing and Mabel and Paz doing a dance step and snapping fingers, Dipper and Wendy gave up and surrendered and began to belt out the corny, yet catchy, old song from 1975:

* * *

You started cheatin' on me the day we met,

I'm pushing you off my list with no safety net—

Do you get me straight, you ready to learn?

Now don't you look at me with those eyes that burn,

Don't start a fire down inside my heart,

You look at me that way, and those bells start—

You touch my hand, there it goes once more—oh-oh—

Holy moley, and I just can't stop,

Holy moley, you come out on top,

Holy moley, you do it to me,

Holy moley, you won't set me free—

Last time we parted you broke my heart,

Why oh why did this have to start?

Holy moley, I can't let you go,

Holy moley, 'cause I need you so!

* * *

Face it, the young couple weren't all that good as singers, but as Mabel was fond of saying, karaoke is not about sounding good, but about sounding terrible together. And that, Dipper and Wendy accomplished with such obvious devotion, having such evident fun, and singing with such enthusiasm—they carried the crowd along on a tide of clapping, humming, finger-snapping, and dancing.

Dipper was grateful because the background noise very nearly covered their voices. In fact, he himself could barely hear the music. He could hear the rhythmic clapping, some voices joining in on the "holy moley" parts, the sound of feet on the floor as individuals or couples danced in place, even Soos's "Go, dawgs, go!"

What he could not hear was going on up in the attic.

Where, currently, two of the aliens were crammed into the closet and completely flummoxed about how to get out. They banged and oofed and grunted and struggled, making rather a lot of noise, all of it covered by the party. Their trouble was that no one on the planet Yukkoph had the least inkling of what a doorknob was or how it functioned.

"Don't do that!" one grunted

"What is that horrible sound?"

"A sonic attack! These aliens must have—stop, I can't move that way!—must have advanced sound weapons!"

"It is horrible! Ouch, that's my foot pad, get off, get off! It's worse that the sounds that begin 'The Island of the Gilly Gan!'"

The other alien groaned at the mention of the Earth broadcast that those on Yukkoph had hated for years but found too irresistible not to listen to. "Stop, stop, now I've got that song in my ganglions! Something's happening!"

"Someone else is coming through! I'm leaving!"

The twin anchors of the interplanetary portal opened, one of the two struggling aliens zipped back to Yukkoph, and before the other could make an escape, a third one teleported in. Conditions did not improve—there were still two bulky, ill-tempered, starfish-shaped aliens trapped in the upstairs closet.

"When the portal opens again, go back and tell them to stop coming!" the first one said. "But open it so I can get home! We must regroup!"

"What is that awful sound? What's wrong?"

"It's a trap! It's a trap!"

Technically, that wasn't so, but pending further investigation—or someone's opening the door of the closet—that order led, in another five minutes, to the conclusion of the interplanetary invasion.

Too bad it wasn't final.


	11. Chapter 11

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 6, 2017)**

* * *

**11: Logistics**

If P'q'xo's species didn't lack both couches and potatoes, one might have thought that the alien was becoming a couch potato. He certainly liked to watch the new heat-o-vision.

Meanwhile, Ford and Fiddleford watched him. "I don't like what I'm a-seeing," McGucket said. "He's gittin' all frostified."

"I was wondering if he were ill," Ford said. "Let me get his attention."

It took cutting the feed, and then P'q'xo reacted like a teenager whose parents had just said, "No more video games tonight, Mister!"

"We'll provide you with more things to watch," Ford reassured him. "But we're concerned that you may not be dealing well with the environment. You're getting a powdery covering on your integument."

The translator clattered that out, sounding like rush hour in the consonant factory.

"This just exudate is," P'q'xo reassured Ford. "Precipitates from water and air. Just need quick bath, will clear pores and fix. Need vat of _olfklg wxoexuh fduh glcroyă dvrox ofuxv._"

The translator struggled with that and finally suggested "Stinky cloud-producing liquid that dissolves crud."

Which required more questioning until finally McGucket nailed it. "We call that-there bromine," he said. "Is it a natural liquid on your planet?"

"In pressure caves," P'q'xo told them. "We bathe when crust accumulate. It only once in a while. On Earth, more condensates in air I think."

"Will this buildup harm you?" Ford asked.

"Eventual. Pores will clog, no transpiration, no breath, and toxic wastes will build up."

"Then I suggest we need to get you home as quickly as possible," Ford said.

"You can always come visitin' later on," Fiddleford told him. "And we'll send you a raft of videos you and the others can watch."

By then night had fallen. Ford and Fiddleford got P'q'xo out of the steam room—his odor was very pronounced now, something like a neglected compost heap piled high with damp cabbages and broccoli clippings. They got P'q'xo into the backseat of Ford's car and drove with the windows down. "I hope this isn't too cold!" Ford said.

It wasn't for the humans—the temperature was still just shaving ninety, and dropping slowly—but P'q'xo admitted, "Little bit cold."

Only when they arrived at the Shack did Ford realize that a party was going on. Cars crowded the lot, music spilled out into the night, and kids laughing and goofing stood around on the lawn and on the porches.

"Can we get him to the family door?" Ford asked. "Without being seen, I mean?"

"He stands out a mite," Fiddleford said. "Like a live possum on top of a birthday cake."

"I'll have to try it."

Ford drove the Lincoln to the far end of the parking lot, eased onto the Mystery Trail, took a hard right, and wound up on the far side of the Shack, with the new wing that Soos and Dan Corduroy had built onto the original building straight ahead. To the right was the small private porch.

"You go ahead and make sure the coast is clear," Ford told McGucket. "I'll come with P'q'xo, we'll hurry upstairs, and he can return home to recuperate."

"Roger dodger," McGucket said. He snuck up to the porch, opened the door, and slipped inside. A moment later, he leaned out and beckoned urgently.

"Let's go," Ford said.

In addition to being more odiferous, P'q'xo was even slower than he had been. Either the atmosphere or the temperature was bothering him—maybe both. Maybe throw gravity into the mix.

Anyway, he negotiated the three steps with some difficulty and then with Ford on one side of him and McGucket on the other, he started the perilous ascent of the attic stairway.

And was only a few steps up when a gravelly voice boomed out, "Poindexter! What've you got there?"

"A visitor," Ford said. "Close the door!"

Stan closed the door to the small parlor, and the sounds of music diminished a little. "What the heck is it?" Stan asked. "It's about to fall backward."

He stepped up and braced his hands against the alien's back. "Thank a you!" P'q'xo replied.

"It talks," Stan said. "Figures."

"Stanley, this is the being I mistakenly called the Invisible Wizard," Ford said.

"Oh, yeah, the thing that made the Ghost Harassers wet their pants. Hey, they're supposed to come back—"

"Just help us get him upstairs," Ford said.

With some tugging, some shoving, and a lot of steadying, they got P'q'xo to the landing and then into Dipper's room.

"Mabbel," P'q'xo bleated sadly. "Want to talk to Mabbel!"

"Mabel?" Stan asked. "Sure, I'll go get her."

"Once you've spoken to her," Ford warned, "you need to go home and rest and recover. This is an alien environment for you."

"Yeah, go relax in one of them there bromine spas," McGucket suggested. "Get your pores cleaned out real good. Tell ya what: I'll rig up a two-way videomatalker. You can talk to us and see us in heat vision, an' we can talk to you and see you in our vision. You can use your heat screen there to see and talk to us. Jest watch fer it to come through."

"I understand."

They heard footsteps on the stairs, and then the door opened. "Now, Pumpkin, don't scream or nothin'," Stan was saying. "It's probably not much worse than a bear."

"Oh. My. Goodness!" Mabel said, standing still and staring at the starfish-shaped creature. "No. Freaking. Way!"

"Mabbel!" P'q'xo cried out joyfully.

"Shimmery Twinklehart! Uh, you've really let yourself go," Mabel said. "Wait, aren't you a CGI character, though?"

"This," Ford said, "is P'q'xo—"

"That," Mabel said firmly, "is not Pikachu. And you're saying it wrong."

"No, he means this is an alien critter from beyond th' bounds of Time and Space that we know," McGucket said. Then he looked puzzled. "How come I put it like that a way?"

"I am the Invisible Wizard!" P'q'xo said. "All this time I see you and Deeper now and then! You are my favorite!"

"Thanks!" Mabel said. "Well, naturally, but thanks anyway! What smells so bad? This place is like it used to be when Dipper left his underwear and socks—"

"P'q'xo has to get home," Ford said. "Our Earth atmosphere doesn't agree with him, so he's about to go into the closet and transport home."

"Like on Star _Trek,"_ Fiddleford added helpfully. "Beam me up! Kinda."

The door opened, and Wendy said, "Mabes, come on! We've got a surprise—oh, you've seen him."

"This is my surprise?" Mabel asked. "Uh—well, it worked."

"No, we've got a video we want you to watch," Wendy said. "Hi, Mr. Peek."

"Hello greetings, Venaday!" To Ford, P'q'xo added, "Is video? Is I can watch?"

"You'd probably skeer some of the young'uns," Fiddleford said. "But—how you a-playin' it, Wendy?"

"Dip's got like a wi-fi feed from his laptop to the big TV," Wendy said.

"Perfect! I reckon I can patch into th' signal and reprocify it fer P'q'xo's own viewer. Won't take but a minute!"

He hurried downstairs, and P'q'xo said shyly to Mabel, "We have from you much to learn, Mabbel Pins. Like how you do makeover on our species?"

Mabel was nothing if not adaptable. "Well, I'd start by emphasizing your best features. Your eyes are so pretty—like blueberries with a coating of syrup! I'd use some violet eyeshadow to give them a little depth—"

"Mouth paint?" the alien asked. "The Grenda used mouth paint, I remember!"

"Sure! I mean, why not?" Mabel said.

"Grenda is here?"

"Oh, no, sorry. She's a long way away. She has a husband now."

"Oh. Good. Is useful, one of them hus-a-ben?"

"They got their uses," Wendy said.

McGucket returned. "All set Mabel, you an' Wendy go down and watch your video, and Mr. P'q'xo can watch it up here. We'll stay with him. After, you can come and tell him goodbye."

"OK!" Mabel said. "Thanks. Nice meeting you, Mr. Peekaboo!"

When she had gone, P'q'xo asked, "What means these peekaboo?"

"It's a nickname," Stan said. "Mabel does that when she really likes somebody. Like she calls me Grunkle Stan."

"Neek a nom," P'q'xo said. "I like!"

McGucket had switched on the feed. "We kin watch it through my lappy top," he said. "And you kin see it through your heat-a-ma-vision. I think it's startin'."

Sure enough, the screen showed Mabel's slightly faded old sweater and the hand-lettered sign that Dipper held up: "Dipper's Guide to the Unexplained #618: Understanding Mabel."

"Is Mabbel!" P'q'xo squealed when her image came up.

Dipper was narrating: "This is my twin sister, Mabel. Together, she and I have unraveled many amazing mysteries here in the little town of Gravity Falls, Oregon. But the biggest, most wonderful mystery, and the one we're exploring now, is 'What Makes Mabel So Great?"

Up in the attic it was a little difficult to follow, because with just a slight lag the words Dipper was saying were translated into clusters of consonants and the occasional trapped, desperate vowel wondering what it had blundered into.

Stanley, watching the video and recognizing many of the old clips, kept going, "Aww!"

Even Ford chuckled once or twice at some of Mabel's philosophic pronouncements.

And P'q'xo watched entranced.

* * *

While out on the fringes of the Solar System, the invading force finally thought it had a handle—so to speak—on the problem of the blocked exit.

They had rifled through P'q'xo's private notes and had found a thin gold plate on which he had carefully diagrammed the closet doorknob and captioned it with a nine-step process for opening the door.

It was a fiendish device, that knobby thing, one of the Yukkophian wizards pronounced.

"What if it explodes?" another asked.

"Or what if it leads into the Void?" another one demanded.

That called for a conference. It had just concluded. The unanimous decision:

"Make M'k-yeh try it!"

M'k-yeh was the least senior Wizard among them. He had barely passed his exit exams and, in the opinion of the other six, was the best qualified to be the least missed should something go wrong.

"Of course, something _will _go wrong," the Second Senior Wizard, a chubby Shrsoh (that meant he was about to propagate)* who tended to have a gloomy outlook, said.

"Bosh, fellow!" grumped the First Senior Wizard, an older Shrsoh who had mastered the Five Points of Magic Engineering and whose opinion was the less magic done by anyone, the better for everyone. He clapped M'k-yeh on the dorsal. "Good man, this. Soon put that d'o'or-k'nob in its place, what, lad?"

"I don't know about this," moaned M'k-yeh.

"If there is any way of messing it up," D'yenn, the Second Senior Wizard, muttered moodily, "M'k-yeh will find it. He has a peculiar genius that way."

"Oh, you!" scolded the Third Senior Wizard, shorter and thicker than the others. She—for the Shrsoh did have genders, though the mechanics were a bit peculiar—and the Second Senior were always sniping at each other, making sour comments, and denigrating each other's abilities. The others supposed it must be love, but being Wizards, they had precious little acquaintance with the phenomenon and considered it might just as well be indigestion.

The Second Senior drew himself up. "I suppose you would deny that M'k-yeh is an incompetent boob?"

The Third Senior patted M'k-yeh's manipulating pad. "No, of course not. Boob he is, and incompetent I will grant you, but he's a dear lad to volunteer for this dangerous mission."

M'k-yeh cleared his pores. "Actually, I don't recall ever having officially, you know, volun—"

"Time," said the First Senior, "is of the essence. Who knows—the creatures of E'ar-th may even now be subjecting poor P'q'xo to terrible tortures of unknown horrors. When we get him back safely, I'm going to kill him."

"No, you won't," Third Senior said. "I know you, you big softy."

"All right, all right, no killin'," sulked the First Senior. "But I intend to give the lad the talkin' to of a lifetime! You, there, M-k-yeh—ready for anything, lad! The rest of you—wands at the ready! Everybody got a good offensive spell picked out? Don't panic and mispronounce any incantations! Don't want any of that silly dissolvin' into primal slime this outing, what? Takes forever to reform one of you who makes that slip-up!"

"M-k'yeh will do it," Second Senior said. "Look at him. He's mirpping in his grutes right now!"

"I am not!" M'k-yeh retorted.

"Orders!" snapped the First Senior. "Come out ready to fire your spell, pick a target, shoot first!"

"And ask questions later!" added the Second Senior.

"Shut your mouthflaps!" roared First Senior. "No such thing! Shoot first! Then shoot again! And then if there's anything left that might answer, you might ask a question."

"Um, I think this is scaring M'k-yeh," said Third Senior.

"Ah. Right, then! Little pep talk!" said First Senior. "M'k-yeh, yours is an awesome responsibility and so forth and so on. No matter what terrible creatures you confront when we open that door on E'ar-th, no matter what deadly weapons they focus on you, no matter the pain that may make you beg for oblivion, remember, we're behind you—and we're glad we are!"

"Thanks," muttered M'k-yeh, who was mentally reviewing alternate career options.

However, other possibilities became moot.

Third Senior opened P'k-xo's closet, Second Senior thrust Mk-yeh in, and First Senior slammed the door. "Go!" he ordered.

And M'k-yeh, who was fairly incompetent, which meant also fairly competent, spoke the spell and was zapped into who knows what peril on the strange and deadly planet called E'ar-th.

Or something like that, anyway.

* * *

_*Oh, all right. Let's talk about sex. The male-equivalent Shrsoh occasionally produced buds, little pockets about the size of an Earthly fig, which formed from pores, normally but not always on the Shrosh's head-tentacle. It was filled with spores. When it was ripe and ready for mating, it would tingle in the presence of Shrsoh females._

_Females could receive the pods, hold them against their breeding cups (you don't want to know) until one of the cups accepted the pod. The pod would then dissolve, the spores would be matched with counterspores (allowing for genetic diversity), and the fertilized spores then would incubate within the breeding cup, forming a sizable swelling that in the final stages made rest for the female an absolute necessity. She would become largely dormant._

_And on the joyous day, the cup would open and from five to seven dozen of the baby Shroshes would creep out. Sadly, more than eighty per cent would fail to mature. The others would grow up to be Shroshes, and the female and male would form a brooding pair to raise them. Not that they had to brood eggs or anything, it's just that a bunch of infant, pre-teen, and teen Shroshes hanging around would make anybody brood. When they were old enough to send away to school, the male/female bond would break and mom and dad would go their separate ways, as would the progeny._

_The Shroshes don't have big family reunions or holidays together. Perhaps that is why they have survived for over seven billion years as a species with hardly any evolutionary changes._

_Or, you know, it could just be one of those things that happen._


	12. Chapter 12

**Understanding Mabel**

**(August 6, 2017)**

* * *

**12: What Happens When an Irresistible Force Meets a Mabel?**

Ford and Fiddleford were just about to escort P'q'xo into the attic closet when the door burst open and a starfish-shaped alien charged out, brandishing a wand and screaming, "Hd'w iurch'q g'hd'wk, dolh'q v'fxp!"

Dutifully, the portable universal translator droned, "Enjoy a serving of cold extinction, other-worldly foams!"

But before it could finish translating the dire threat, the creature swung its wand and a jet of light shot out, aimed squarely at Ford.

And somehow Stanley did a sideways dive, intercepting the fierce beam.

P'q'xo shouted, "Brx exgoh'vv l'glr'w, wk'hvh duh iulh'q'gv!"

The translator said, "You naughty-adjective-having-to-do-with-a-failure-to-reproduce witless being, these my friends are!"

"Stanley!" said Ford, bending over Stan.

Stan stood up. "That actually felt good! Nice and cool!"

The two aliens faced each other and carried on such a furious conversation that it made the translator start to smoke as it tried to keep up:

"You we thought had been kidnapped by Ear'th criminals!"

"No, I the means of instantaneous transportation have managed by means of a temporo-dimensiono—ERROR TOO MANY COINED WORDS—device and have me now this new planet explored!"

"I must the portal shut, or the others will not come through!"

"Leave the portal open you must!"

But the new alien slammed the closet door. It unslammed itself and a much larger starfish-shaped alien came out holding a wand at the ready and shouting, "Khoor, koor, khoor , zkdw'v doo wklv wkhq?"

The translator wheezed, "Greetings, greetings, greetings, what is everything here transpiring, then?"

When all three aliens began to babble at once, Fiddleford unobtrusively switched off the translating machine before it could explode. The third alien shut the closet door, which in quick order opened twice more and disgorged two more aliens, both with wands. One of them fired a beam at Dipper.

It was like coming in from a muggy, hot day, and the automatic door of the, oh, say, pharmacy opens, and there's a great blast of cold, cold air that wakes you up and makes you grateful for the relief.

Mabel stuck two fingers in her mouth and whistled so shrilly that the glass in the triangle window buzzed in harmonic vibration. "ENOUGH!" she yelled. "Time out!"

Two wands shot jets at her, practically condensing snowflakes from the air. "Whoosh!" she said. "Thanks, guys, but I'm not the one who needs cooling off!"

In their own language, Second Senior yelled in despair, "Our mighty weapons are no match for their puny intellects!"

Third Senior asked, "Is it cold in here, or is it just me?"

First Senior bellowed, "Everyone shut up! Resistance is effective!"

Ford cleared his throat and gargled—at least, that's what it sounded like to Mabel and the others.

But to the aliens, he said, "Peace incoming! No hostile us am! Stick your weapons in your, ah, um, er—"

For good or ill, he could not for the life of him recall the alien word for "pocket," which was just as well, because it was a euphemism for "reproductive cup" and might have resulted in even more misunderstanding. That would have been sad, because the amount of misunderstanding rattling around in the attic was just about the maximum allowed by law.

However, by an extraordinarily coincidence so extremely improbable that something really, really improbable, like a couple of guided missiles spontaneously transforming into, oh, a whale and a bowl of petunias, would outdo it only by a narrow margin, the syllables "Ah um er" roughly corresponded to the command "Be friendly or die an unspeakably horrible death that I shall think up any moment now" in P'q'xo's language.

First Senior said cautiously, "Stand down, everyone. It's not bluffin'."

So silence, if not peace, fell suddenly, and they all stood around staring at each other.

"Hiya!" Mabel said brightly. "I'm Mabel!" to the Third Senior Wizard, she said, "You have the most beautiful eyes! Such a bright red!"

Third Senior edged away from her. "Is this one going to eat me?" she asked fearfully.

"That is a Mabbel!" said P'q'xo. "A being that values life and wears a star!"

"Run, it's the cops!" screamed Second Wizard, because in another extraordinary coincidence, the Shrsoh who were the nearest equivalents to law-enforcement officers wore star symbols as their equivalents of badges.*

"Stand down, Second Senior!" snapped First Senior. "Everyone, put your wands in your sheaths this instant. Now gurgle pleasantly."

"What . . . are they doing?" Dipper asked as the aliens all started to burble.

"I think they're gargling," Mabel replied. She gargled in response.

"This," said P'q'xo, "in language mine the same as smiling to you is."

"It's workin'!" the First Senior said. "Listen, the Mabbel is pleased!"

"She's scaring me," said M'k-yeh.

"Everything scares you," First Senior pointed out helpfully. "My Surihvvru, look at P'q'xo! What did they do to you? You're crusting!"

"Atmosphere here does this," P'q'xo said. "Cannot live here long. Uh—who are you?"

"Tell him who I am!" First Senior ordered Second Senior.

"Big bag of—" began Second Senior, who by a kind of magic, I suppose, instantly became Third Senior.

"You're Second Senior now!" bellowed First Senior to the former Third Senior. "Now you tell P'q'xo who I am, and—this is key, mind—do not try to be funny!"

"This is the First Senior Wizard of the Unknown College of Magic," the newly-minted Second Senior said. "He is P'x'ggolqj Ulglf'xorxv w'kh Sohd'vl'qj Froru."

"First Senior Froru!" said P'q'xo. "I am P'q'xo Zefia, private scholar. You might have read my published plates, 'Upon the Possibility of Traveling by Means of Using Nearby Realities that Are Not the Same as Our Reality and Circumventing the Distances Implicit in Time and Space!"

First Senior stared at him. "Sorry, never heard of you," he said at last. "Catchy title, though. Good on you for that."

"I will take what I can obtain," P'q'xo said in a resigned tone.

"I'm freezing," M'k-yeh murmured forlornly.

"What are those rhythmic vibrations?" asked the new Second Senior.

"That 'music' is called!" P'q'xo said quickly. "In this domicile below us a great celebration is being held!"

"Ah, so they knew we were comin'," First Senior said with a satisfied smirk. "Good, these alien horribles at least know how to be polite. Kind o' catchy, ain't it?"

Downstairs, Soos was blasting the evergreen ballad "Love it Even Louder" by Kizz. In the attic, small loose items were doing a dance of their own, inanimate though they might be.

"Oh, man," Wendy growled. "Now I got that in my head!"

Dipper said, "If you want to get it out, I think Soos still has 'Straight—'"

"Don't say it or I swear, the wedding is off!"

Dipper circumspectly dropped his suggestion.

Second Senior grabbed M'k-yeh's manipulating pad and improvised some dance steps. The picture of the sailing ship fell off the wall and onto Dipper's bed. Downstairs, Soos cranked up the volume.

Ford had a hurried, top-of-their-lungs conversation with McGucket.

Stanley tried unsuccessfully to negotiate a deal with P'q'xo—"Look, I'm tellin' ya, sign with me, you'll be rolling in dough in no time! And then I get it all, but we'll get more for ya to roll in later!"

When at last Soos segued from hard rock into a soft, danceable ballad (Me-4-U's "I Vow"), Fiddleford started the translator again—it had cooled off, at least—and Ford called out, "Attention, everyone! We have much to do and little time!"

Due to the mostly untested nature of the translator's CPU, that came across to the aliens as, "Look at me! I share with you great quantities of work that you must do in impossible time!"

"Now you're talkin'," said the First Senior. In fact, as the chief administrator of an educational institution, that was the essence of his philosophy of supervising his faculty: give them way too much to do, demand it in way too little time, and then encourage them by telling them repeatedly how disappointed in them he was. It had seldom failed him.

What with the party going on downstairs, and the group of people closed up in the attic, and the tendency of heat to rise, the attic began to feel stuffy to Mabel. She fanned herself with both hands and nudged the new Second Senior. "Hey, any chance of you hitting me again with that cool-breeze thing? Look at me, I'm sweating like Waddles!"

"Waddles doesn't sweat, Mabes," Wendy pointed out. "He wallows."

"A technicality." Mabel pointed to the wand and to herself. She mimed the kind of swish-and-flick that had accompanied the cold blast.

"What does the Mabbel want?" the new Second Senior asked P'q'xo.

"Um, to be hit with the Chill Spell, I believe," he said. "Excuse me, we're negotiating our return."

Oh, well. Second Senior pulled the wand, hesitated, and then hit Mabel with a spell that would have immobilized any Shrsoh.

"Ooh, yeah, that's the stuff!" Mabel said, unbasking in the coolth.

"This one is a superhero," Second Senior told M'k-yeh.

"I'm afraid of it," he said.

"Right!" First Senior bellowed. "We've reached a whatsit, an accordion!"

"Accord," M'k-yeh corrected.

"Shut it! We're takin' young P'q'xo back to civilization and givin' him a one-hurchix vacation in th' Bromine Spa of M'zhizzian, right, that'll clear up his frowst."

"He gets a _vacation_?" squealed former-Second-now-Third Senior.

"Are you buckin' for Fourth Senior?" yelled First Senior. That was the other main component of his administrative philosophy—Pile on the work, restrict the time, and yell at everyone. A few of the wizards might have argued with his policy, but it was impossible to argue with the First Senior personally when he was standing beside you yelling at top volume into your tympanic membrane. Hang the "I'm-not-your-boss-but-your-friend," the "My-door-is-always-open" approach. Results were what mattered to First Senior. Yelling usually worked, and it worked then.

"Right," he said when silence answered him. "That's sorted out. He's to come to the College as an independent researcher to consolidate his findin's, which will be top secret, anyone who violates that will immediately an' permanently be assigned not to middle-school teachin' but to kindergarten—"

Everyone gasped. That was, well—no one could recall such a harsh sentence, ever.

"So that's settled," First Senior continued. "This environment's bad for us. I can feel my joints stiffenin' already, and before long my pores will start to clog. So physical visitation's right out, understand?"

They murmured assent.

"HOWEVER," First Senior boomed, "this alien bein' here—his name is F'or-ud—is First Senior at an Ear-th college of, um, magic and suchlike. Him and me, we'll establish safe communication through the Portals here and in P'q'xo's basement. We will consult, confer, converse, and otherwise hob-nob like brother wizards, dedicatin' our shared knowledge to peaceful ends, so on and so forth, M'k-yeh, what the HELL are you doin' with that Mabble?"

"I think it's a friend-bond," M'k-yeh said. The Mabel was painting fingernails on the back of his manipulating pads, which lacked nails, so she was simply adding some brightly colored dots, with glitter.

"Well, stop it! Where was I? Right, we're getting' some tek-knowledge-y stuff from the First Senior here that well let us communicate. And that's that. Until further notice, personal visitin' back and forth is forbidden—Second Senior, you, too?"

"Look how the spots glow!" Second Senior said. "It makes me feel more attractive!"

"There you go," Mabel said happily in Earthspeak. "Hey, high five—up top—yeah, now slap! There, that's a high five! Teach it to everybody on your weird alien planet!"

"Let's go!" the First Senior said. "Uh—you first, P'q'xo. You really need a bath."

P'q'xo, in his halting English, said, "Must farewell you now, strange friends from other world. Regret so little time. Would have liked to ride on bicycle! Across moon! But when you need me—" he held up his right manipulating pad—"I'll be right . . . there!" He pointed at the closet.

Then with a last look around, he went inside, they heard a zap, and First Senior opened the door. "I reckon it worked. Just in case—here, M'k-yeh, take this, it's a two-way communicatin' tek-knowledge thing—and in you go. Push this when you get safe to Yukkoph, if you do."

"_If?"_ squeaked M'k-yeh, but he got shoved in, the closet door closed, and _zap!_

A moment later, the receiver—Fiddleford was holding it—flickered a green light. "He's OK," McGucket said.

Like a captain remaining on his sinking ship, First Senior stayed behind until the other Shrsohs had departed. Then he bowed and opened the door—

But Mabel tugged on his arm-tentacle. "I'd like to kiss you goodbye," she whispered.

That took some explaining. Reluctantly, First Senior agreed and stooped over. He murmured in his own language, "You're just so damned ugly!"

Mabel understood none of that. Still, she took that as a compliment.

She would have taken it that way even if she_ had_ understood.

Hey, she was Mabel.

And then the aliens were all gone—"Open a window!" Wendy said, because the whole place smelled like a stack of wet dogs and old socks—and Mabel said, "The party's still going."

"I coulda made a killin' with that guy," lamented Stan.

"Count your blessings," Ford advised his brother.

Stan murmured, "One, two, three, four, a fin, six, seven, eight, nine, a Hamilton. . .."

"Come on," Mabel urged. "I want to see my video again! Hey—Grunkle Ford, can you send a copy of my video to that Patootie guy?"

"Very simply," Ford said.

"Then do it!" Mabel ordered, fist in the air.

And—well—there's more to the story. There's always more to the story. However, let us for now simply say that an interplanetary war was averted, two planets acquired new legends of eldritch horrors, humans and aliens learned a few things about life, the universe, and everything—

And Mabel became the toast of two worlds.

In a limited but satisfying way, of course.

And in Gravity Falls, life went on.

* * *

*It may be worth noting that very few Shrsohs ever broke the laws, because there were so few laws to break, the main one being "Everybody leave everybody else the hell alone!" Imprisonment and fines were unknown. Trials did not happen. Nor did the Enforcers, as the police were called, inflict death, grievous bodily harm, or even minor booboos on offenders. Instead, they stared hard and droned sorrowfully, "What would your dear old Mum think of the way you're acting?" That was always enough to make the erring miscreant sentence himself or herself to a years-long time-out to think it over. If that didn't work, there were always middle schools in need of teachers. That threat alone was enough to scare any Shrsoh straight.

On Yukkoph, nobody ever crossed an Enforcer. If trouble happened, an Enforcer was the first one they looked for and the last they wanted to meet. It was a chancy job, and it made a Shrsoh watchful . . . and a little lonely.

* * *

The End


End file.
